Switching from MoveableType to Wordpress
[prev] Fri, 14 May 2004 19:15:56 -0400 [next] [computing] - [comment]
Last year, I set up a MoveableType weblog for Erin. She's used it, albeit sparingly, with a certain amount of success.
However, with yesterday's bait and switch, I suddenly had the urge to move her to something else. Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with people wanting to make money from software, but I don't get the warm fuzzies from the MT folks anymore. I was also not too keen on running MT anyway, as it's not exactly the most secure piece of software on the planet.
I moved Erin to Wordpress, a pretty nice GPL'd CMS. I was able to get it up and running (and import all her old entries/comments) within 15 minutes. You can check the results here. Here's a great tutorial on how you can do the same.
Like I said, if SixApart wants to make money on the software they've written, that's totally cool. Just don't expect everyone to do a deer in the headlights and fork over $70. As I've mentioned elsewhere, I enjoyed coding my own CMS (which incidentally, doesn't really have a name) -- Yes, it took time, and yes, it's far from perfect. But it's mine, it didn't cost me anything other than time, and the amount of stuff I've learned has been more than worth it. I don't have to worry about comment spam (yeah, yeah -- security through obscurity)... and the desire to make it work better, look better, and adhere to standards has kept me interested in working on it -- in my eyes, it's never perfect.
And that's the probably the best part!
I wish I had the time to build a CMS right now. I'm probably going to stick with MT short term while I work on a Knowledge Base to pitch to my boss to replace our current-godawful one, which will be 1> a great learning experience 2> A huge timesuck.
Yeah, it's not something you can just hammer out in a couple hours. Well, I guess you could, but you probably wouldn't want to. Back in the good old days:
http://web.archive.org/web/20021205195203/www.alphamonkey.org/notes.php
the site was just a couple of tables that I just grabbed the last couple rows off of. Then I got curious about how to implement comments, and how to make a homebrew RSS feed, etc. Then I started thinking about what sort of statistics I could get out of all this data I entered and collected.
In hindsight, it's really sort of obscene. I probably should have been out drinking/doing drugs/impregnating young nubile females... but no, I was doing this instead.
Ah, college.