tvor.net

After using Movable Type for just over 2 years, I decided that it was time to move onto something better… WordPress. The main reasons for my switch are listed below:

• Pricing. After providing their software for free, Six Apart started charging for newer versions of MT. I’m not really sure why they would charge for such ’simple’ blogware. After all, there was a time when I considered writing my own blogging software but decided to try WP instead, which is free and open source.
• Static content. When a new entry or comment is submitted using MT, static web pages are generated instead of querying the database when these pages are accessed. This could have an advantage on high traffic sites where the number of queries is greatly reduced when simply viewing a blog entry. However, it doubles the diskspace required for the blog content as there are copies on the static pages and in the database. It also dramatically increases the amount of workload put on the server when an entry/comment is added since it must rebuild several webpages. This can also cause headaches when deleting comment spam as all of the affected pages have to be rebuilt. WP comes to the rescue and retrieves all of the entries and comments dynamically from the database. It makes sense to me.

The switch to WP was quite uneventful. MT entries/comments could be directly imported into WP without much effort. I was then able to use MT to create a script for looping through the entries to create output for forwarding old entries to the new WP entries in my .htaccess file. It was rather amusing to use MT against itself.

Here is a snippet from my current .htaccess file which takes care of forwarding all of my old entries to their new location. This also allowed me to remove the old static content and simply rely on the database backend.

RewriteRule ^archives/([0-9]{4})_([0-9]{2}).php /$1/$2/ [R,L]
RewriteRule ^archives/000491.php /2005/09/15/job-hunting-and-walk-the-line/ [R,L]
RewriteRule ^archives/000490.php /2005/09/05/rolling-stones-in-moncton-review/ [R,L]
...

I have now been using WP for almost one week and haven’t had any problems. I’m sure the comment spam will be on it’s way, but having builtin support for moderating comments and not having to rebuild static content, removing spam shouldn’t be too difficult. During the past week I have also dabbled into WP plugins and rewrote the “last comment by” to be used with WP. I am currently working on another simple plugin which functions similar to del.icio.us where I can post links into my blog with ease, taking advantage of some of Firefox’s features.