Like many others, I’m switching from Movable Type to WordPress. But there are all kinds of changes going on round here at the moment. It started when I got a phone call from my web hosts, XCalibre, telling me that I’d gone over my 1Gb per month bandwidth limit and offering to upgrade my account, for a fee.
Some investigation later, (which mostly consisted of consulting a friend who never misses a bargain), and I discovered Powweb. They seemed too good to be true, with ten times the storage and 150 times the bandwidth allowance, for slightly less money. This is probably possible because while XCalibre are in the UK, Powweb are in the USA where presumably overheads are lower and competition is tougher. But it’s a global market, and since I run this site as a hobby and have never had to speak to web host staff in person, I can’t see any disadvantage to being hosted in the USA.
It was during the move that I discovered how hard it can be to move a Movable Type blog from one host to another, especially when using the Berkeley database and the host you’re moving to has a different version of the Berkeley DB libraries.
And what with all the kerfuffle about Movable Type’s new licensing, which wouldn’t have affected me much if I hadn’t lost my original tarball for 2.661, and could only now get hold of of version 3 without paying, I started to look around for alternatives.
WordPress appealed immediately because it is released under a GPL license. Mark Pilgrim sums up some of the advantages of this quite nicely:
WordPress is Free Software. Its rules will never change. In the event that the WordPress community disbands and development stops, a new community can form around the orphaned code. It’s happened once already. In the extremely unlikely event that every single contributor (including every contributor to the original b2) agrees to relicense the code under a more restrictive license, I can still fork the current GPL-licensed code and start a new community around it. There is always a path forward. There are no dead ends.
I discovered that not only was it easier than I thought to transfer all my content across to WordPress, but I could also keep all my permalinks too. And WordPress is slick. It has an extremely nice interface full of simple touches that you may not notice until you start using it in earnest, such as the “Save and Continue Editing” button combined with a preview at the bottom of the edit screen.
Finally, while there have always been loads of add-ons for Movable Type, moving to WordPress has spurred my interest once more, and I have found plenty of cool add-ons that will appear here before long (once I’ve sorted out the template and style sheet), including Amazon Media Manager, email notifications (ok, Movable Type has this by default but it’s the only feature I used that WordPress hasn’t), WP Photos, and Mobile Edition.
[...] e you can shorten the title in the slug yet keep it long in the title. Rob, not that Rob, moved. Ooo, this one’s pretty well with what looks to be a scor [...]
Congrats on a smooth move. It didn’t seem to go too bad for you at all. Interestingly enough, I just rambled off a post on Linux and Libertarians
. No research.. just a bunch of stuff I thought was important.
Hope the new location is good for you, Rob. I still enjoy visiting to see what you’ve got to say, regularly.
Cheers, Ian. I’m glad to see the DNS has switched over already. A bit more work on the layout and fonts and I’ll be there. And that’s a good article on open source you have there.
Glad to see the move went OK – welcome to the world of 5Gb a day! Although I agree with almost nothing you say, I was wondering where the email notifications had gone! Hey – this “comment” section wraps oddly in ie6….you have to resize the window to get the scrollbar back. And I preferred the scripty font you had at the to when you were in beta!
Email notifications will be back soon, hopefully. There is a ready made hack for it, but I want to modify it, and that entails learning a bit of PHP and MySQL (I have a book on order).
Thanks for the heads-up – I’ll have to test in IE6 at some point.
You can’t be wrong all the time, surely?
Switchers
G’day Mate switched to WordPress and went hogwild in the process installing hacks.
Here’s a new one to me Wackomenace with a little on why he switched.
Carthik.net gives instructions on switching.
Nother one BK Design moved and needs to lear…
Amy Acuff