Moved from MovableType to WordPress

Tonight, I moved this site from MovableType to WordPress.

The transition is a bit ridiculous and easy. WordPress has made a mockery of the MovableType installation process – there is pretty much no comparison.

The first time I considered moving away from MovableType was when the owners of the company (6apart) started charging for personal blogging licenses. That was obviously a mistake – and it was around that time that WordPress was taking off. All WordPress needed at the time was users and 6apart provided the perfect impetus for MovableType users to make a mass exodus to WordPress by charging the very users who helped build MovableType itself.

I was an exception because I had other things to do at the time besides install a new blogging system. The repeated trauma of installing MovableType made the idea of installing and moving fairly unappealing. I was happy to skip that idea.

Over the years, MovableType has been adequate in many regards, inadequate in many others. One of the most glaring examples lately has been the lack of an app for the blogging system itself, and the lack of commitment by the company that owns the platform to develop for it. It had a good run. It’s over.

Update: Some trickery was required to swap from the subdomain for installation – 1-click installation has to occur on a domain which has no files existing within it (for whatever reason.) Had to reinstall and reconnect the DB this morning – even though it was working last night.

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5 Comments

  1. Congrats on the move! I’ve been thinking about it for a while, even made a test installation/migration (which was stupid-easy), but didn’t want to throw out the work I’d done customizing MT only to start over. But the points you make are all good ones, especially the lack of a proper mobile app. I’ve wanting a mobile app for MT for literally years now. I did find one, BlogPress, but it had bugs with its MT integration, and the developer seems unlikely to fix them at this point (it’s been 3 years). Maybe it is time.

  2. Hey Krishen,

    Thanks. We should skype while you do it. There are a couple of things that I can point you to in order to save you a significant amount of time when it comes to the transition.

  3. I’ve been thinking, no planning, of doing the same for a long while too. And like you, I’ve been dreading it mostly because of all the tweaks and custom code stuff I’ve had to do with MovableType to get it to work to my liking. Knowing that the move is not so hard gives me hope. I’m now planning to make the move over the holidays this year. I’m looking forward to having access to import my tumblr feed (and hence my Instagram photos) on the fly.

  4. Graham, definitely those are perks of having a modern platform powering your website. Also, I really like the WordPress app – simple but makes the experience really gel on the iPhone.

    Did you know that you can set up an email address for WordPress to perform auto blog postings from? Then in Instagram, you could add that email address as one of the sharing destinations. Haven’t tried it yet so I don’t know if it emails the photo, or a link to the photo. The alternative is that the mobile app has an image upload button (HELLO! finally – MovableType’s mobile admin interface never could do this) and it’s a pretty smooth experience.

    I am pretty sure that I get geek points for doing the SSH portion of the installation (mostly moving all my images from one site to another, making and renaming directories etc) over my phone as well. I don’t recommend doing it this way though!

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