Some first impressions of WordPress:
- WordPress seems very much influenced by MovableType, coming from the latter. Who knows…maybe it was the other way around with MT4. Either way the UI is all very similar.
- I run a server with multiple IPs and which hosts multiple domains. Some of those have a blog. It is unlikely I’d ever do anything other than have multiple domains on the machine, each with a single blog. With MT I have to do multiple MT installs as best I can tell and admin them all. Same for WordPress. Although WordPress-MU potentially offers a way around that. WordPress and WordPress-MU also are integrated into my OS’s package system. If the blogging software is packaged with the OS and I only have that single instance installed, administration is easier. I’ve got a fair amount of digging here to see if I can actually do what I want, but it sounds possible (Multi-Site Manager plugin?). In MT I probably also could move to a single install of MT, but it’d still be a tarball I plunked down in the fs somewhere and managed manually.
- Security: I really like that it is very simple to tell WordPress that all user logins and administration should happen over SSL. With MT this isn’t horribly hard, but involves a bit configuring in apache.
- Plugins: At first it looked like I needed a special plugin just to send mail which seemed crazy. Again, as with MT, I’m apparently not the normal WordPress user. Most seem to admin their own WP instance in a virtual host that somebody else provides. So they’d not be allowed to run a mail server and have to do mail via POP. But I did end up getting a mail from WP so this did “just work”, but the config made it look like it wouldn’t. I’m generally not crazy about having to run lots of plugins.
- Themes: I used to comprehend MT themes a bit, simple CSS and simple MT specific mark-up. WP seems similar, but my first attempt at minimally making a mod’d theme doesn’t appear to have worked. More poking to do I guess.
All things considered things look very similar between the two. MT’s a bit more polished.
Next step is to try importing all my old content, checking if links were correctly preserved or if there’s apache url rewrite magic I can do to make them be, do some performance comparisons and try posting from my phone.