I have been through quite a few different ways of blogging over the years. The personal blog I started back in 2001 originally used the ur-blogging tool GreyMatter, written by photographer Noah Grey — this was before such idiot-proof tools as Blogger and Typepad came along, so you had to be comfortable editing impenetrable Perl code to use it.

Later, when development of GreyMatter became stagnant and its shortcomings were evident, I moved on to MovableType, which for a while was the undisputed king in the increasingly crowded blogging software realm. It still required a certain level of expertise to install, but it was easier and more flexible than GreyMatter. All went well until many A-list bloggers had a falling out with SixApart, the creators of MovableType, because they decided to — gasp — charge for their software, which while free of charge had never been open-source.

Meanwhile, open-source application WordPress had been creeping up on the inside, and MovableType bloggers deserted to it in droves. That seems to have been the beginning of the end for MovableType. It was still free for single-user, non-commercial blogs, worked well, and I happily went on using it for my personal and recipe blogs.

Eventually, SixApart saw the error of their ways and released a version with an open-source licence. I made the mistake of upgrading my recipe blog to the latest version a few weeks ago. All of a sudden things that used to be easy became difficult. The admin area wouldn’t even work in my browser of choice (Opera on Linux) — so I had to go and use a Windows PC every time I wanted to write a post. Templates had become hugely complicated, and the back office used a fancy Ajaxified interface so that you could no longer simply type or paste in the code for your templates. Rebuilding the blog after making changes to the individual entry template became impossible.

I was reluctant to change systems, and thought I might wait for the bug-fix release that was supposed to cure many of the reported problems with templates. But I started to ask around, and WordPress expert Shelly told me “But exporting from MovableType to WordPress is a doddle!”

She was right; it was a 5-minute job to export 200 posts from MovableType and import them into WordPress. I then spent a few hours working through an excellent tutorial in order to convert my MovableType theme to a WordPress one. This article was useful too. It really was that easy.

Although this blog runs on WordPress, I have spent no time customising it; I just installed it, added a ready-made theme, and started posting, without bothering to explore further. Converting my food blog means I’ve had a chance to get much more familiar with the way WordPress works.

I can’t say I like the way it mingles PHP with HTML in the templates; in my own code I have achieved almost complete separation, and it looks much tidier that way.

But on the plus side, once you’ve understood the famous WordPress loop, and the template variables, there are many advantages.

  • Creating and modifying themes is child’s play compared to MovableType.
  • The admin area is simple to use and get around in (just remember to turn off the visual editor!).
  • It’s written in PHP (as opposed to Perl for MovalbeType), which means I should be much more comfortable with it.
  • It’s dynamic — no need to wait for ages for it to rebuild after a simple template change.
  • There is a host of plugins if it doesn’t work the way you want it to out of the box, opening the way to adding all sorts of extra features.

Plugins I have found useful so far:

  • AKismet: for trapping comment spam
  • BadBehavior: also traps spam; most people seem to use it in conjunction with AKismet.
  • Simple-Tags: The one thing the import didn’t do was pick up my MovableType tags. I hadn’t used many (because tags are a relatively recent feature in MovableType), but it would be a pain to have to go into every single post and add tags individually. This plugin lets you bulk-tag posts — an essential feature I would have thought.

And finally, WordPress has become so ubiquitous that I had no excuse not to learn more about it; this was a great opportunity to try it in a risk-free way on my own site before unleashing it on clients.