Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
I am about halfway in my move to WordPress. Have run into some interesting challenges along the way, but also have discovered a couple of nifty things that help compensate for the more interesting of the interesting challenges. There’s one feature, in particular, for those of us who like to write long posts that makes up for most of the problems; a feature I think will end up being standard in all weblog tools–once the tool makers finally decide that we’re not all link-short comment-and post webloggers.
It’s a groovy feature.
For those thinking of moving to WordPress from Movable Type, I have a lot to talk about, which you might be interested in–especially if you have a lot of posts, comments, trackbacks, and have made extensive use of MT tags. Tomorrow, though, because I’m about exhausted. However, as an early hint: clean up your old postings that are still in draft mode. You don’t want to have a lot of drafts.
And publishing is sooooo fast now. Unbelievable. We’ll see how general page access goes.
In addition, I had looked at two additional PHP/MySQL weblogging tools during this time, and I have some notes on these that I’ll also provide. In case you’re wondering, these were B2 evolution and Textpattern. I’ll give the whys and wherefores of why I went with WordPress…tomorrow.
For now, help me test. Ping me. Comment. Push buttons and let me know what breaks.
Also, notice how I managed the categories? WordPress doesn’t have a primary category–rightfully so, the concept isn’t particularly meaningful–which did cause some challenges with my category icon next to my posting title.
But then I thought: why just list the one category? So, there you have it – all categories are now listed. I had to hack into the WordPress code to write a function for this, but I think I can break this out into what is known as a WordPress Hack, which is code that extends WordPress but isn’t part of the official build. I still have to see how this works. This extended function would work as a plugin, too, but the plugin architecture for WordPress isn’t out until version 1.2 (in the works).
Regardless, I rather like the multi-category icon list. Sometimes change is good.
So first thing we learn: Don’t touch Movable Type. Second thing: copy index.php to a safe location once you get the template fixed. WordPress does not maintain a copy of the template in the database. Don’t make this mistake at home, kiddies.