End Of An Era
It is with a teeny measure of sadness that I've made the decision to move from Movable Type to WordPress. This is probably the last post I'll make from my old stalwart system.
So why move now? Well, two reasons really.
Firstly my hosting provider Pair, while excellent in every way, don't like mt-comments.cgi at all. Their system reaper process will kill anything using up system resources on the machine. So adding comments to any of my posts was always a bit hit & miss, sometimes it would work, sometimes you'd get the lovely internal server error. All a bit frustrating really.
Secondly, my version of Movable Type went end of life a while ago. No more security updates will be produced and you're basically on your own and good luck with that. Further, there's no upgrade path even if I wanted to continue with MT. The free single user license is no more. Sure you can get Movable Type 6.0 but I'm not shelling out $595. I'm funny like that.
So, it seems the choice is obvious as there is really only one game in town these days. I installed WordPress the other day and have been tinkering and tweaking and it's almost at the point where I'm ready for it.
So, you WordPress users out there, what plugins would you recommend I install?
Which is the complete opposite of me… not only am I not sad about wanting to leave MT, I'm ecstatic at the prospect of it all. And it's not just in recent years, now that support and updates are dead, I've ALWAYS wanted to leave it because documentation and resources have never been very good (if they exist at all). WordPress eclipsed MT six years ago. I would have made the move then but, as now, the work involved in creating new templates and such is more time than I have available.
Yeah that was one thing that gave me pause – I've also spent a lot of time tweaking things under MT's hood. And your templates are much more involved than mine.
Why not just replace MT's comments with Disqus???
Has Disqus fixed the issue whereby a user's website won't be linked unless they've created an account with them? Last time I checked that was a deal breaker but it's been a while. Plus switching out the comments doesn't change the fact that my MT install has been end of life'd ;-)
I don't about that issue Kevin. I suggested Disqus only because of its ubiquity on weblogs! :-)
[…] assuming all has gone well, the old Movable Type site is but a memory now. Gone to spend more time with its […]
I admit to almost always getting an error when leaving a comment on your blog. It almost always posted the comment, I just had to reload and revisit the page and it would show up after a few mins.
As for plugin recommendations:
Akismet – controls spam comments very well
All in One SEO Pack – a lot of options for adding SEO tags to each post.
Better WP Security – protects the blog from attacks
WPtouch Mobile Plugin – great plugin to make your blog fit nicely on iPhone and other smartphone devices.
Awesome. Thanks mate.