Movable Type > WordPress

I originally setup this blog as a number of our clients were asking about running blogs on our servers and I hadn’t any experience with the various tools involved. After trying a few different perl and php blogging tools I settled on Movable Type.

MT was quite easy to install, but requires a number of Perl modules that do not come with a base install of Perl.
As MT is so popular there are a lot of plugins available for it, but it was not without its faults. The one that was most annoying was the amount of spam that it attracted.
When the licensing model changed a couple of months ago a lot of people were rather annoyed (to put it mildly), and it made it quite obvious that continued usage of MT was not as viable as before.
A few weeks ago I came across WordPress and began to experiment.
Compared to MT WordPress was not as popular, but after reading other users’ blogs it soon became apparent that a lot of people were switching over to it.
The only thing I was concerned about was porting my existing MT blog over to WordPress. Although my blog isn’t that big I really didn’t want to start from scratch again!
Fortunately for me the WordPress developers had already thought of that and include a plugin to import Movable Type blogs into WordPress.
All I had to do was export my movable type entries to a plain text file and then import them again into WordPress. Easy.
I made the move about a week ago.

Differences
Unlike Movable Type, WordPress uses “normal” php and css for the templates.
PHP with MySQL
Publishing of new entries is instant ie. no rebuilding
WP offers both keyword filters and a comment queue to help avoid spam
The default text editor is more advanced and can easily be extended via plugins
Plugins are easier to load and control
Licensing – GNU license
Search-engine friendly URLs
Some of the plugins I have running on this blog are:
Amazon plugin which gives me quick links to items on Amazon and WP grins which is handy for adding emoticons to posts.
You can use your own stylesheet or grab one from Alek King’s huge collection