Why I’m Planning The Move To MT

I’ve been working on the migration to Movable Type over the last couple of days.
Unfortunately doing it “cleanly” won’t be easy due to WP’s broken XML export 🙁
In any case I’ve posted some preliminary notes on what I’m taking into consideration and how I intend to deal with the issues if and when they arise.
So the question that a number of people have asked me, both in public and private, is a fairly obvious one:
Why are you moving away from WordPress?
If you are a regular reader on here you may have come across a number of my previous posts where I was dealing with the performance issues.
Even though I have tweaked things and appreciate Donncha (and others) taking the time to help me squeeze more out of it, I’m really sick of WordPress’ inherent lack of decent performance. Rob went into some detail on his own testing and the results were truly shocking.
The number of queries to render an entry on this server, even with all the tweaking, is just plain silly (and most of the plugins that I’m currently using don’t even add DB queries – they’re more aesthetic).
And what about security?
Of course software will have bugs and need to be patched and upgraded, but over the last few months the number of times I’ve had to run around late at night upgrading installs to avoid serious issues was just getting on my nerves. And what’s WP’s response? They seem to avoid the issue. The last security upgrade isn’t flagged as serious, yet the bug sounds serious. I may be missing something, but the number of upgrades I’ve had to conduct would show otherwise.
The other issue is management.
If you only write to one blog or possibly two then logging in twice might not be an issue for you. I, on the other hand, have over a dozen blogs. I looked into WPMU, but to get it working with multiple domains would have involved hacking the files and the database – and I’d still have to upgrade every X weeks when yet another security hole was discovered.
MovableType on the other hand is really slick.
I can login to one interface and then manage as many sites as I want. Not only that, but I only have ONE install to worry about upgrading!
Whereas a lot of the minor tweaks that you’d use on a WP install involve 3rd party plugins, MT makes it easy to customise and add functionality with its existing system.
Performance wise MT is a lot more attractive as the entries are real files on the filesystem and not just mod_rewrites or temporarily cached files (via yet another 3rd party plugin – notice a trend anyone?)
Another thing that bugs the life out of me is WP’s attitude to their users and advocates.
Over the past 3 years I have probably recommended WP to several hundred people directly and possibly thousands more indirectly (pushing blog hosting for example). However WordPress is more than happy to ignore Europeans and run adwords campaigns to promote their US partners ONLY.
SixApart, on the other hand, seem to have a much more open attitude to the rest of the world, possibly because they have staff and offices spread across the globe.
So in a nutshell I will be happily moving away to something that I am happier with on both a technical and philosophical / moral level.
You may find some of my reasoning a bit odd, but it’s my reasoning and I’m quite happy with it 🙂