Many people know that Shelley switched from Moveable Type to WordPress a couple of weeks ago; Dorothea is looking to make that move eventually; Dean Allen’s new CMS Textpattern has been hailed in many quarters; and I can’t by any means ignore Blogware from my Accordion City friends Elliot, Ross, and Joey. I have a hard time suppressing the temptation to change horses myself.
I moved over from Blogger once the limitations of that wonderfully free (as in beer) managing-and-hosting tool grew uncomfortable for me. Moveable Type seemed way more powerful, way more attuned to the kinds of fiddling I wanted to do, than Blogger was (or would become) — and at the time, the principal alternatives were Radio, Bloxsom and Greymatter. Remember the O’Reilly book about “Essential Blogging,” with four software options?
At this point, I should admit that I have never used the same word processing software for more than a year or so in a row. I used MS Word 3 when we got our first Mac, and then switched to WriteNow, ClarisWorks, Word 4, back to WriteNow, Word 5, WordPerfect (maybe my longest word-processing allegiance), AppleWorks, and now Mellel (as I flirt with AbiSoft). My file archives define miscellaneity in formats, much to my periodic frustration (does anyone make a WordPerfect to some-OS X-format translator, please?), but I decline to lock myself into an application whose features don’t correspond to the ways I want to use it. I shift among other competing applications, too — SuperPaint, ColorIt!, Painter, and (of course) Photoshop;PageMaker, InDesign, and RagTime; and so on. I learn to make applications do what I want them to, and if I find that they don’ do that, or don’t do it satisfactorily, I look for an application that does.
Moveable Type has been giving me some headaches lately — unwelcome commercial comments, and glacial rebuild times — and the contours of version 3.0 don’t signal that I’ll like it much more. I’m wary of TypeKey; much as I weary of dealing with comment problems, a centralized registration system doesn’t sit right with me (and, sad to say, that makes me hesitate before adopting Blogware, too). WordPress and Textpattern are open-source, which appeals tremendously to my Disseminary ideals. And, as I confessed above, I get restless.
Now, the Disseminary is complicated enough that it would be a brutal headache to transpose all the entries to another CMS. Most important, of course, I haven’t talked to Trevor about it. But the sirens are singing, and those new applications look so slick and shiny. . . .
Posted by AKMA at May 2, 2004 11:08 AM | TrackBackNoo.... pleeeze don't gooo!
Posted by: Joi Ito at May 2, 2004 12:11 PMOne wife, one Church? What is this middlife crisis in blogging?
Posted by: Phil at May 2, 2004 12:48 PMWe've done our best to make WordPress primarily a writer's tool. If you try it out I'd love to hear your feedback whether you choose to use it or not. Anyway if you decide to go with it I'd be glad to personally assist you with any transitions. Importing is pretty flawless and all permalinks can redirect.
Posted by: Matt at May 2, 2004 03:43 PMWordperfect 3.x will still launch under Classic and you can load your old documents. I've never been able to save them as RTF for some reason, but copy and paste works fine. Just Select All, Copy and paste into a Mellel document. Piece o'cake.
Posted by: dave rogers at May 2, 2004 07:16 PMThat’s what I’ve been doing, Dave (actually, I’ve been saving as text, opening in Mellel, since the clipboard seems to go wonky between Classic/WordPerfect and OS X/Mellel). I’m just looking for a step-saveer.
Posted by: AKMA at May 2, 2004 11:29 PMI've been looking hard at Textpattern because it seems much more like a writer's tool than MT, which tends to show its origins as a link+note tool. So I'm interested in Matt's statement that Wordpress is a writer's tool. I've followed Shelley's conversion, but have hesitated to follow suit because of all the work involved.
Posted by: joseph duemer at May 3, 2004 07:43 AMI set up test sites with both Textpattern and Wordpress over the weekend. I'm impressed with both so far, especially the lack of rebuilds. Right now I'm leaning toward Textpattern, since in some inarticulable way it feels more intuitive to me. Importing from MT, however, is raising some problems at the moment.
Posted by: steve at May 3, 2004 08:58 AMI switched to WordPress some time ago and have never looked back.
Posted by: Rex at May 3, 2004 09:47 AMI have blogs in almost everything (Blogger, Wordpress, Nucleus, Blosxom, and a few lesser-known engines) but MovableType. Most of my blogs border on commercial use and MT's license agreement prohibits such use without paying a hefty fee.
If I had to start from scratch I'd probably pick Blosxom for most of them. From the standpoint of someone reasonably well-versed in web technology, it's difficult not to admire Blosxom's simplicity and flexibility, not to mention that there's just one file to upload and configure for a basic installation. One!
For usability and reliability (as when getting your less-savvy family to participate in a blog), you really can't beat Blogger. It's always available and I rarely have to worry about configuring anything but my server's FTP settings.
Posted by: Chris Holland at May 3, 2004 04:38 PMIf you're going to switch from MT to another CMS, I would recommend Scoop. It wasn't designed as a blogging tool at all, but it has the most powerful comment system out there. It is also open source. DailyKos moved to Scoop a while ago and people seem to like it. It has rudimentary trackback support, so it will still work integrate with the blogosphere. And the best this is that you can get it to do anything. Since it is all perl, if you want to add a new feature, all you have to do is hack together some perl and you have your new feature. If you want to check it out, you can find it at http://scoop.kuro5hin.org.
Just so you know, I am not associated with Scoop in any way. I just love the program and I think it is the duct-tape of CMSs, it can do anything you can think of, and then some. It's a glorious program.
Posted by: Grant Henninger at May 3, 2004 06:47 PMComment spam was depressing me until I installed MT Blackllist , which worked like a charm.
Rebuilds are a pain, although Blacklist will mitigate that problem considerably. Spam was my big reason for most rebuilds.
I used pmachine for my next project . The big plus is that it's php based, so pages are built dynamically and there's no rebuild. I also looked at Scoop. It's not ready for nonhackers, and installation requires that you have root access to your server. If you don't own the server, Scoop isn't for you.
Try installing Blackllist (it's really easy) and ask yourself if you really want to do another migration.
Posted by: Barry Parr at May 4, 2004 01:36 AMI installed WordPress briefly when I was in the midst of changing servers, but I decided that my server and my operating systems (XP to OSX) and my CMS at the same time was a little further over the insanity line than I was willing to tread. Oh, and I was switching from 5 blogs to one meta-blog too
I decided to wait for MT3. TypeKey will be optional, as far as I understand. It is my hope that we'll be able to let registered folks post comments immediately, and let unregistered folks' posts be sent via email for approval. That will encourage folks to register, and discourage spammers from commenting, because they are not going to get anywhere.
TypeKey is not MSPassPort, so I have little hesitation to use it.
MTBlackList is an essential piece of MT right now, although early reports are that it doesn't work in MT3, I don't see it as needed for MT3 (which I haven't used, just read about).
That said, I've switched from GreyMatter to MT, and already flirted with WordPress, and may check it out again once the dust has settled.
BTW, AKMA, do you have a PC anywhere in the house? There's a free 30 day trial of WP12 that was just announced and can be downloaded from Corel.com.
It'll be hard to leave WP behind once I leave Windows behind (it'll be easy to leave Windows behind) but I'll adjust. Right now I'm waiting for Office 2004 to come out.
MacLink Plus Deluxe will convert, in bulk, WordPerfect Mac files to a variety of current formats, and it generally does a good job. It's also AppleScriptable--as in fact is WordPerfect under OS 9.
http://www.dataviz.com/products/maclinkplus/index.html
Posted by: Lisa Spangenberg at May 6, 2004 05:59 PMHave you looked at pMachine? We are considering that for a blog about to be launched. Did you ever use Radio, and if you did, what was your experience? In my case, it was too geek-friendly and not user-friendly enough for me...a writer, not a techno-inclined geek type.
My main blog is in Manila. I like the simplicty of it, and over the years have mastered enough of the tech obstacles (or received help from either the Userland crew or via the e-mail help board).
Have you managed to save the history, or make it something that you could post, when changing blog clients?
--Dean
Posted by: Dean Landsman at May 6, 2004 06:17 PMLearn Linux.
Posted by: Jenkin at May 8, 2004 06:01 AM