About this site's lack of design: Yes, it's supposed to look this way — I'm helping create a new sandbox theme for WordPress (see it on GitHub).

Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Suffering from chronic idiocy since 1977

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MovableType to WordPress

I’ve done it: as of 10 min­utes ago, and thanks to some con­vinc­ing con­ver­sa­tions with Bryan and Steve at SxSW, I decided to finally make the move to Word­Press, and leave Mov­able­Type behind.

It wasn’t an easy deci­sion: I’ve been toy­ing with the idea for almost a year now, and, like with most rela­tion­ships, I was com­fort­able and didn’t see any rea­son for change (though there were rea­sons, believe me).

I didn’t just want to use any old exist­ing tem­plate for this con­ver­sion, and I wasn’t in the mood to use the then-current design of SB (which I haven’t been fond of any­way), so I opted for a new design, using an idea I sketched while on vaca­tion in Jan­u­ary. Now, this is an exper­i­ment as far as I’m con­cerned (Fire­fox users: yes, I know some post titles, such as the one you’re read­ing now, end up under the speech bub­ble; it works in Safari, so I’ll just have to play a lit­tle… nev­er­mind, I fixed it; IE/Win users: aside from scold­ing you for not switch­ing to Fire­fox already, there are a few bugs I need to fix, but it’s not a pri­or­ity — while you’re wait­ing, snack on a feed), and I’m pretty sure I’ll replace it very soon, but I wanted to see how it would work on a live site, and I also needed a guinea pig for my first real crack at a Word­Press tem­plate (I had started con­vert­ing Keith’s Blue­Blog tem­plate a while ago, which I had fin­ished on the XHTML/CSS end, but that stalled…). I’ll col­lect my thoughts on the design itself and some of the issues I faced turn­ing it into a live lay­out as well as con­vert­ing it to a WP tem­plate, and post those sep­a­rately soon.

The short of it is, I’m now using Word­Press, and I can already tell you that I won’t be going back to MT. It’s noth­ing per­sonal, I just feel like Word­Press is more writer-friendly, and for some­one like me who needs a swift kick in the writer’s rump more often than not, a more pleas­ant writ­ing envi­ron­ment makes for more fre­quent writing.

I have to thank Bryan and Steve for their incred­i­ble patience with my time-restricted learn­ing curve over the last few weeks, and also for their help with WP tem­plate tags, MySQL queries, mod_rewrite voodoo, and gen­eral moral sup­port. Guys, I owe you each at least one beer…

So the ques­tion is: Why do you use (insert CMS name here), and what makes you love it?

This item was posted by Dan Rubin on Monday, April 3rd, 2006.

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24 comments on “MovableType to WordPress”

  1. Posted by Patrick Haney on Monday, April 3rd, 2006.

    What the…?! When did you put this new lay­out up? And where the hell was I that I didn’t notice?

    Con­grats on mov­ing to Word­Press, some­thing I plan on doing soon. MT makes me cringe.

  2. Posted by Dan Bowling on Monday, April 3rd, 2006.

    Glad to see another high pro­file blog­ger switch over to WP.

    I use Word­Press myself too for now, as I mostly do blog­ging on my site. Word­Press offers a great tem­plat­ing sys­tem, doc­u­men­ta­tion and an even bet­ter com­mu­nity. That, com­bined with the huge num­ber of plu­g­ins, Word­Press is clearly the best blog­ging solution.

    As soon as they get their act together, I plan on switch­ing to Sym­phony by 21 degrees though. Their XSLT based sys­tem and stan­dards com­pli­ance seem top notch, but their soft­ware is by no means ready for pro­duc­tion. Their sys­tem is more of a real CMS, so I think I would still keep Word­Press as my blog­ging solution.

  3. Posted by Faruk AteÅŸ on Monday, April 3rd, 2006.

    I use my own hand-crafted CMS; I love it because of many things. I hate it because it’s pro­pri­etary to my for­mer com­pany (who I cre­ated it for) and I can’t take it with me to a new host :(

    It’s got a lot of aspects that I per­son­ally think are done much bet­ter than, say, Word­Press. The URL struc­ture and gen­eral dynam­ics of the sys­tem are much “smarter” to me (i.e. no ?page_id=### by default, no weird dis­tinc­tion between the blog and pages, etc. etc.) but as said, pro­pri­etary, lim­it­ing my abil­ity to use it in the future :(

  4. Posted by Ryan Brill on Monday, April 3rd, 2006.

    I use Type­Space, and I love it because I wrote it. ;)

    One of these days (aka years) it will be avail­able for pub­lic con­sump­tion, and it’s got some pretty nice fea­tures, if I do say so myself.

    Unfor­tu­nately, a lot has been hold­ing me back from relea­se­ing it, includ­ing the obvi­ous issue of sup­port­ing it. I bairly have time to fin­ish it up, much less deal with the sup­port requests that are bound to come pour­ing in…

    Any­way, nice design. The only thing I don’t like is how small the con­tent area is. Makes it a bit hard to read.

  5. Posted by Nik Steffen on Tuesday, April 4th, 2006.

    Glad to see you moved to the Word­Press Camp. I like the new site design aswell, just that the ver­ti­cal text in the side­bar boxes is a bit hard to read. Part from that, great job!

  6. Posted by Koen on Tuesday, April 4th, 2006.

    I use typo and I love because it helps me to get famil­iar with/and to become a Rails-guru :D

  7. Posted by ACJ on Tuesday, April 4th, 2006.

    First of all, I kind of like this design. I think I pre­fer it over the former.

    To answer the ques­tion: I have web­sites that are pow­ered by Mov­able­Type; I have web­sites that are pow­ered by Word­Press; and then I have web­sites that are run by hand-crafted cms. My per­sonal site is cur­rently pow­ered by an older — rather heav­ily hacked — Mov­able­Type install, and it still gets the job done. If I’d ever switch, it could only be to this new cms I have been craft­ing in my head for over a decade now. I plan to put some seri­ous work in said cms after grad­u­a­tion, which should be in about three months.

  8. Posted by Jonathan Snook on Tuesday, April 4th, 2006.

    I still use Mov­able­Type. I haven’t seen enough of a leap in fea­ture­set to make the attempt at jump­ing to Word­Press. If I had to start a new blog right now, I’d choose Word­Press or Expres­sion Engine. Or roll my own. :)

  9. Posted by Dan Rubin on Tuesday, April 4th, 2006.

    Patrick: You didn’t miss any­thing, the new lay­out comes with my switch to Word­Press… and it will be chang­ing again fairly soon :)

    Ryan: No fair using your own, those of us not smart with computer-ized thingys have to use what other peo­ple build… ;) I agree about the con­tent area, for some rea­son I have a desire to try things that I know might not work, just to prove it to myself… that’s one of the main rea­sons why the design will be chang­ing again soon :)

    Nik: Agreed, and sim­i­lar to my reply to Ryan, it’s more an exper­i­ment in shades than any­thing else. I started this lay­out as if I were design­ing a printed page, and I wanted to see how it would fare in the real world, under actual use. And it’s turn­ing out to be a pain in the ass :)

  10. Posted by Anton on Tuesday, April 4th, 2006.

    Nice! I did the same thing recently.

  11. Posted by Nathan Smith on Tuesday, April 4th, 2006.

    First of all, great re-design.

    Sec­ondly, I use Textpat­tern, and what I love about it are the XML style tem­plat­ing tags. It means no fuss­ing with PHP includes. It also allows you to build your logic fairly eas­ily, for switch­ing dynamic parts of a site.

    If Textpat­tern didn’t exist though, I’d prob­a­bly be a Word­Press fan.

  12. Posted by Paul D on Tuesday, April 4th, 2006.

    I started build­ing my blog in Word­Press but never got it done. There was just too much finicky muck­ing about in PHP and pro­duc­ing pages that didn’t work right.

    Then I tried Textpat­tern and had my site up within a day. It’s a lot more intu­itive to adjust pages and tem­plates using Textpattern’s sys­tem, and writ­ing is just as nice with Textile.

  13. Posted by Dan Rubin on Tuesday, April 4th, 2006.

    I’ve heard many good things about TextPat­tern, but to be hon­est every time I’ve tried it I get dis­tracted by the ugly UI — I may be turn­ing into a bit of a UI snob here, but that’s also why I had to install Steve Smith’s Tiger Admin plu­gin for Word­Press before I was 100% happy using it.

    I am attracted to well-designed “things” — UI’s, fur­ni­ture, cars, tea mugs, phones, com­put­ers, suit­cases, shoes, you name it. The expe­ri­ence of using some­thing aes­thet­i­cally pleas­ing makes my life better.

  14. Posted by Chris Griffin on Tuesday, April 4th, 2006.

    I tried Word­Press and I hated the tem­plat­ing sys­tem. I hated it so much I got rid of word­press within hours of installing it. If you are not that famil­iar with PHP then Word­Press is prob­a­bly not for you.

    Mov­able Type’s tem­plat­ing sys­tem on the other hand was a lot eas­ier to learn than WP. If you over­look the rebuilds and the instal­la­tion, there’s really not much to not like about it. I guess I don’t know what all the fuss is about.

    I use textpat­tern to run my Port­fo­lio site and I learned its tem­plate sys­tem in a week­end and got my site up and run­ning over the span of a few weeks.

    But I don’t think Textpat­tern is that great of a blog pub­lisher. It seems that its try­ing to do way too much being a CMS and a blog pub­lisher at the same time. The inter­face is not pretty but I like a lot more than WordPress.

  15. Posted by Dustin Diaz on Tuesday, April 4th, 2006.

    Where’s the naked <body>? — I was expect­ing to see the redesign come right after ;)

  16. Posted by Aleksandar on Tuesday, April 4th, 2006.

    Now, this is much more likely design. :) Sim­ple (enough) yet very dis­tinc­tive — very good work.

    I use Word­Press. I started way back — used MT pric­ing thingie as an excuse. I was never com­fort­able with MT they way I wanted to be and switched to Word­Press because:
    – it had fired-up devel­oper com­mu­nity
    – it was free and will stay that way
    – sicne it’s PHP based, it allowed me to do what­ever I want with­out inter­fer­ing with base code

    Rea­sons for not going TextPat­tern way — the same as yours. UI is a real turn-off.

  17. Posted by Tony on Tuesday, April 4th, 2006.

    I use Word­Press (on 4 dif­fer­ent sites) because I find it to be the eas­i­est *and* most pow­er­ful tool for the job. The plu­gin func­tion­al­ity is very pow­er­ful, and users have writ­ten so many great plu­g­ins it’s enough to make your head spin. Each of my instal­la­tions is very different…both in look and feel, and func­tion­al­ity. Each has a dif­fer­ent set of plu­g­ins enabled, although there are some com­mon plu­g­ins I install in every new installation.

    The tem­plat­ing sys­tem is one of the best I’ve seen. So easy, yet so powerful.

  18. Posted by Dan Rubin on Wednesday, April 5th, 2006.

    Dustin: Noth­ing like putting a new design in place only to strip it bare less than 48 hours later, eh? :) And I’m still con­tem­plat­ing a new design for the May 1st Reboot…

  19. Posted by Phu on Friday, April 7th, 2006.

    “that’s one of the main rea­sons why the design will be chang­ing again soon”

    I’m glad I got here before you did. What a lovely redesign!

    Per­son­ally, I use WP because it makes the bor­ing stuff easy and allows me to con­cen­trate on the bits I find more inter­est­ing, namely design­ing and writing.

    I’ve done my time devel­op­ing cus­tom CMS’ but some­times you want some­thing that just works. No need to worry about spam, or mess­ing around with a tem­plat­ing engine. I know my way around and so, I can fig­ure out ways to get it to work for me with­out me hav­ing to put in a great deal of graft.

  20. Posted by Zach Inglis on Saturday, April 8th, 2006.

    I like the new theme very much!

    Wel­come to the Dark Side too :D

  21. Posted by Jeroen Visser on Saturday, April 8th, 2006.

    Con­grats Dan, on the new design. Look­ing good, but I find the con­trast of the head­ings (‘menu’, ‘projects’, etcetera) to be pretty low. And turn­ing them on their side adds a lit­tle extra chal­lenge to read­ing them.

    As for the TextPat­tern UI: wasn’t it the beauty of XHTML and CSS that you could change the pre­sen­ta­tion with­out hav­ing to touch the struc­ture? Hence: why not a TXP Tiger Admin­is­tra­tion CSS?

    My cur­rent expe­ri­ence with TXP is that it is incred­i­bly ele­gant, sim­ple and pow­er­ful. But appar­ently its pre­sen­ta­tion belies its ease-of-use.

  22. Posted by Dan Rubin on Sunday, April 9th, 2006.

    Jeroen: Regard­ing the menus, thanks for the input, but remem­ber this is mostly an exper­i­ment (a lux­ury I can afford since this is my per­sonal site). I’m inter­ested to see the reac­tion to ‘labels’ like those in columns 2 and 3, since they are indeed low con­trast and ver­ti­cle. I wanted to see how far I could push the con­trast barrier.

    I take issue with TextPattern’s UI not only because of how it looks, but also how it works (in my expe­ri­ence, it wasn’t as intu­itive as Word­Press — that’s not really a mea­sur­able prob­lem, but I have to feel com­fort­able with my per­sonal pub­lish­ing system).

    If some­one were to pro­vide an alter­nate ‘skin’ for TP’s admin, I would indeed give it another try, but it would have to do more than just give it a facelift.

  23. Posted by cristinamarie on Tuesday, April 11th, 2006.

    Not too long ago I owned a domain where I blogged. I used Mov­able Type and had some­one else install it for me. I, not too famil­iar with install­tion etc, I thought hav­ing some­one else install it to my site would be great. Even after­wards, I found it dif­fi­cult to nav­i­gate and I did read the “how to” install/setup MT to your site. Now I’m with Word­Press and I find it very easy to nav­i­gate through the so-called unde­sired mess.

  24. Posted by patrick on Thursday, April 13th, 2006.

    For what it’s worth, I REALLY like this design, espe­cially so because it mim­ics a print piece (and well).

    Hav­ing used both Word­Press and TextPat­tern, I found TxP fare more con­fus­ing and much less intu­itive than Word­Press. If you know PHP, Word­Press is a bet­ter way to go due to the tem­plate tags.

    They are both easy to be up and run­ning with in less than an hour, so they both win there.