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My first impression on WP is very positive. By now, I’m convinced that my MT set up going crazy was a blessing in disguise.

I was used to the (awkward) MT templates and stuff and it took me about 3 days straight to get the hang of WP and customize everything. By now, I’m convinced WP is a superior product than MT. The way the index file uses regular PHP makes customization painless and the admin interface is crystal clear.

Chris’ Corner

So about a month or two ago I started to look around for new blogging software. Somehow (for some reason I can’t remember how at the moment), I stumbled upon WordPress, a PHP-based blog that has gotten great reviews by bloggers for its speed, flexibility, power, and ease-of-use. What a nice combo, cannot be true I thought.

I was wrong. It was all true. I literally had a test installation of Wordpress up, running, and my first post as we speak in just 5 minutes. All from lying down on my bed at 11:50 PM EST, laptop on my lap, on a wireless connection to my parent’s cable Internet connection.

Shattered Sun

And let’s not even go into the rebuilding aspect, which just dies on the slowest machine in my house. I realize that machine is way too old, but it handles Wordpress without a blink. That is important to me. I want something that doesn’t bog my computers, no matter how old they happen to be. I also wanted something that I didn’t have to take an hour to install every time I chose to get a new server. I realize that I’ve only had to do it twice for myself, but that’s 2 hours of my time that I could’ve spent doing other things.

Finally But She’s A Girl has a very interesting entry about her switch, and I’ve just taken the smallest slice of it here. She’s going to blog more about her switch in the future so she’s worth watching. Her site looks good too.

I tried a number of different blogging tools, but eventually settled on WP after setting up a test blog and playing with it for a while. It’s a great system—extremely easy to install and configure, and yet with a lot of scope for advanced customization. Better yet, it’s Open Source, so anyone can contribute hacks and fixes for it. It’s also free as in beer.

King of Nothing

The first thing that impressed the hell out of me was how easy it was to install WP — I had a working copy in 3 freakin’ minutes. Not only that, but WP imported 3 years worth of posts in 10 seconds! Heck, it took me over a day to get MT running simply because I had to ask my webhost to go fetch a dozen PERL modules just so I could get the installation to run.

Just A Girl

Of course, I realized I was doing it to myself. All I really needed to do was open up that program that I downloaded months ago and take a look inside the wrappings and see what all the hub bub is about. I’d prove them wrong. I was happily existing within my MT environment, thankyouverymuch.

Then I looked. It was…*sniff*…beautiful.

No rebuilding! Only THREE basic templates to do – not 8, or 9 or 10! The ability to password protect entries! The cute little smilies built right in!

Memoirs of a Geek

Plus, because of the archiving style built-into MovableType the site was swelling up in size with web files all over the place. I’m not a fan of statically created pages at all. I think it leads to bloating and to make changes, you have to rebuild every single one of them pages. So, I have been looking for another blogging tool to run this site off of. I looked at all of the major players other than MT and found WordPress to be the best out of all of them. I checked it out and even created a test install with some of my existing entries. I thought MT was easy to install and setup. MAN was I wrong! This stuff set up in very few steps and importing my entries was a cinch. This default template is rather snazzy and XHTML compliant right out of the box which I never got on a fresh install with MT.

Cold Fury

Man, this thing flies – for posting, anyway. Friggin’ turbocharged blogware – I love it.

atmaspheric

Not only can you edit and delete without worry, you can actually edit your posts right from your own page. You don’t login to a control panel like MT in order to make an edit, you can click the continuously helpful Edit This under each post title. I can get right in, make the change and republish the post in seconds – with minimal effort.

If you have switched from another system to WordPress and blogged about it be sure to send me a note.