Word PressOver the past few days I’ve been busy re-coding and tweak­ing for the big move. At last, I’ve man­aged to port over the archives and site to Word­Press.

Essen­tially my most chal­leng­ing task was try­ing to make it appear seem­less. How­ever, most of the time in this tran­si­tion was spent re-coding var­i­ous aspects of the site that I felt could be tighter. For instance; I never was entirely pleased with the Nav­i­ga­tion menu, which has now been updated, thank you very much and as far as the style switcher is con­cerned it’s being re-coded as well to work smoothly with WordPress.

My rea­son­ing behind mak­ing the jump from MT to Word­Press wasn’t because of the recent pric­ing scheme released by Six Apart but mostly due to the fact I’ve always wanted Word­Press to power this site. I’m a sup­porter of Open Source soft­ware and use it every­day at work and at home, whether it be Fire­fox for web-browsing, Thun­der­bird for email, or Miranda IM for instant mes­sag­ing I believe Open Source has a lot to offer, not to men­tion superb com­mu­nity support.

In regards to Six Apart’s deci­sion to con­form to a pay­ing model, I say more power to them. Mov­able­type is an excel­lent CMS and in the near future I plan on deploy­ing MT 3.0 on this server and pow­er­ing the main kartooner.com site, which will serve as a por­tal of sorts. I real­ize I could have stayed with ver­sion 2.61, but I’ve heard great things about Word­Press and felt the need to make the plunge. Change my per­spec­tive if you may and work with some­thing different.

Wordpress Edit Template screenAlready I’ve noticed sev­eral note­wor­thy fea­tures of Word­Press. For one, the inter­face is beau­ti­ful and stream­lined to the point where your entire site needs only one tem­plate. In MT it was nec­es­sary to set up Indi­vid­ual and Date-based archives. WP dynam­i­cally gen­er­ates the URIs accord­ing to how you’ve set it up, there­fore elim­i­nat­ing the need for sev­eral tem­plates or includes for that matter.

The MT Import fea­ture worked flaw­lessly as you can see. All 300+ arti­cles have been trans­ferred to Word­Press and it only took a mat­ter of sec­onds. No re-building, no muss and no fuss. The only thing I can think of at this point would be that some of the arti­cles used dif­fer­ent plug-ins, but that’s an issue I’ll deal with in time.

All in all it was a suc­cess­ful trans­fer and mer­its spe­cial thanks to the team of Word­Press devel­op­ers who’ve devoted their time and energy towards a won­der­ful product.