Well, I have now migrated this blog to WordPress – twice:
Last weekend, I was very impressed that the installation took only 5 minutes, and WordPress seemed to provide all the functionality I need. So I customised the style sheets and started migrating the non-blog pages of my site to WordPress.
I left the archives for the MovableType blog in place – mainly so that the links via Google would still work. And I made a big mistake in installing WordPress in the same location as MovableType. What I overlooked is, that if anyone posts a comment to the old blog, it causes the whole blog to be re-generated from the MT database. Well, it didn’t take long before that happened, and overwrote all my hard work (index.php and some other files)! Naturally, in my haste, I hadn’t yet backed up the new files that I had created. Well, I know now that once you have installed WordPress, you can’t reinstall it, if the database tables it uses in SQL still exist, and my backup of the SQL database that I had made contained a syntax error, so it wouldn’t restore. Of course, I only discovered that after I had dropped all the blog’s tables from the database…
Well, to cut a long story short, I have now repeated all last weekend’s work and can continue migrating the other parts of the site, such as our photo-album. If you are looking for an assessment of WordPress, from someone who knows what they are talking about, you can find several interesting articles on Shelly Power’s website at her Burningbird blog.
My reasons were quite simple—I had an ongoing series of problems with the combination of MovableType and my internet provider – lots of Server 500 error messages, timeouts and most seriously, the inability to make a full backup of the blog (which is not large) or in the last few days, to maintain my MT-Blacklist anti-comment-spam list, which is essential these days if you use MovableType. And looking around, WordPress seemed to provide what I was looking for and was easy to set up.
There’s still quite a bit of fine tuning and migration to be done, which will take some time, so be patient for a week or two until it’s finished.
