It’s only Monday and we already have several new switch stories for you. Thanks to everyone who mailed in!
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.
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.
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.