I have switched my home page (and for the moment, only home page) from Movable Type to Wordpress. Consider it an experiment. I’m thinking of switching my “Human” page but wanted to wait until I had fully experimented enough to make sure I would be happy with the switch. This page is a bit simpler and less active than my Human page so it made a fit test subject.
So far, I’m quite happy. I foresee Movable Type quite possibly being totally abandoned by me for Wordpress in the near future, but we shall see after a much more in depth and extended usage test. Why? Well, Wordpress has many things going for it:
- It’s free and open source, yet still quite robust, with great features plus many more available via plugins
- I’ve read that the community is really great. Bugs are addressed in a timely manner and since it’s open source, anyone who knows what they’re doing can help improve it and write great plugins for it.
- It uses php to generate web pages on the fly. No static pages just taking up your web space. It also generates in strict compliance with web standards! Wooot!
- Once I got past the initial learning curve of staring at some php and going “duhhhhhhh” I found it actually much easier to setup, maintain, customize, hack, and manipulate than MT. Surprisingly simple and lean. When I though of a feature I wanted but it didn’t have, I quickly and easily found a plugin, installed it and had it working in the blink of an eye. I easily uninstalled and reinstalled several times. It was only a matter of minutes before I was completely back up and running again. The one or two times I had to start Movable Type from scratch were a huge pain, and I try to avoid it at all costs.
All in all, I’m extremely impressed so far, but just want to take some time and make absolutely sure before I do a total switch.
