(This is my last post about the WordPress migration, I promise!)

I liked WordPress better than Movable Type as soon as I’d installed it, and my opinion hasn’t changed. If you’re using MT and haven’t tried WP, do try it out!

The only advantage of MT that I have noticed thus far is that it is possible to manage several blogs via one control panel. But on the other hand most settings and templates are blog-specific anyway, so I’m not sure how much time that actually saves (apart from software upgrades).

Just about every part of WP is more user-friendly than the MT equivalent. The control panel is better designed and easier to navigate. The templates are more transparent and much easier to work with. Instead of MT’s strange tags (of which there are two flavours and I could never remember what the difference was) WP uses normal php functions.

Wordpress is also more feature-rich and more flexible. I can create static pages in addition to blog posts, add a list of links, easily switch between themes, add direct “edit this” links to individual posts, etc. And from a developer point of view, the WP functions give me more control with less work (mostly because they have many more parameters) than the MT tags.

Wordpress makes tinkering a lot more convenient because pages are served dynamically. MT on the other hand pre-builds and saves all pages, so each template change leads to a full rebuild of all the affected pages. With 600+ blog posts, the rebuild caused by a change to the main template takes long enough to make me really reluctant to change things. (And there is no option to rebuild just one post as a test case.)

The documentation for WP is an order of magnitude better than that for MT. Compare: the MTCategories tag vs the wp_list_categories function.

My initial plan was to use an existing theme for this blog, perhaps only changing a few fonts and colours. I browsed a bunch of themes, downloaded half a dozen, and tried them out. When I had picked the few that seemed most promising, I took a look at the code of each one to see which one would be easiest to modify. The WordPress template structure turned out to be so clear and transparent and the documentation so helpful that I ended up writing my own theme, using the existing themes only as a source of ideas and to get an idea of what functions were available. And I did this when I had no experience of WordPress, whereas I never got comfortable enough with MT to write a theme from scratch, even after having used it for over two years.

So I got a nice exercise in web design, learning PHP and CSS, both of which I’d touched before but not really used much. Now I can write passable PHP code and do some pretty nifty things with CSS. Hmm, perhaps I could find a way to squeeze in some javascript here, too?

I also had the pleasure to use the Firefox Web Developer extension. A very nice tool, so good that it’s worth downloading Firefox just to get that extension.