I just put the finishing touches on my first WordPress site yesterday (a web site for my high school’s fifteenth reunion), and I do have to say that I am really digging WordPress. My design was rather derivative of the default Kubrick theme, but I wanted to keep it uncomplicated my first time out.
WordPress has got a number of features that make it even better suited as a simple CMS than Movable Type (“pages,” lots of conditional tags, ten levels of user permissions). I appreciate simple. The Roxen CMS that is slowly becoming a large part of my professional life is decidedly not simple. God, I hate Roxen CMS. Grumble.
I have to reiterate how much I loved all of the conditional hooks in WP; I just wish it wouldn’t have taken me days to find them in the confusingly organized documentation.
I doubt that I will be switching notMike.com over to WordPress anytime soon, especially with version 3.2 of MT right around the corner (I think I will sit out the beta period, though). The promised new anti-spam features can’t come soon enough; MT-Blacklist just isn’t cutting it anymore. Granted only 287 comment and trackback spams out of 7723 attempts have gotten through in the past year, but that is still too many.
PHP is such a fun language to work in. I really need to convert this MT-based site over to PHP. I tried once already, but quickly switched back. I use too many MT plug-ins that break under PHP. Unlike the WordPress community, the MT world is straddling the fence between PHP and Perl, and it’s more than a bit confusing.
I suppose it will be good for me to know both WP and MT (our university semi-officially supports MT) but any new blog-based sites I create, though, will probably be in WordPress.
Just curious, what plugins were you not able to find PHP equivalents for? We’ve got PHP versions of almost everything, but they may just be too hard to find, and I’d love to do a better job of documenting them if needed.
Oh! forgot to mention, we also have MTIf….Else conditionals for almost everything in MT now, so those should help simplify a bit, especially since tools like Adobe GoLive understand MT template tags natively.
Hi, Anil,
That is exciting news about conditionals in MT. I love how you can set up a WordPress template in such a way that if the page is an archive, apply this CSS class; if a post is part of a certain category, do this; etc. It is really starting to change the way I think about how I use blogging software.
As for the plug-ins and converting my site to PHP, my mistake was that I tried to convert my site during a weekend where I did not have the proper time to devote to it. In a month or so when I try again, I will devote a few days and work on a duplicate version of my site, so that I have enough time to work out the bugs.
I agree that the PHP equivalents of the plug-ins are tough to find. It is especially confusing because some plug-ins may be extensions to Smarty, rather than MT-specific. It would probably help quite a bit to have a separate directory of the PHP compatible plug-ins on Six Apart’s plug-in site (or at least some iconic indicator that a PHP version is available or that a plug-in breaks under dynamic publishing).
As for specific plug-ins, at the time I could not find an equivalent of WordCount, FirstNWords, and Henrik Gemal’s Acronym and Favicon plug-ins. And I wasn’t quite sure if other plug-ins like Compare or BanNumericEntities, for example, would still work, so I chickened out and quickly reverted back to static publishing for now.
Dynamic publishing is definitely the future, and the more you guys can do to encourage new and existing MT users to go dynamic and the more you do to encourage the vast community of PHP developers to write plug-ins for MT, the better for us all.