Les, you may be interested in this two-part tutorial comparing WP tags to their MT equivalents. Kind of helps wrap one’s head around the transition.

After showing both interfaces to my mom last night she thought that WordPress might be easier for her to work with so I took EE down and installed WP to play with. It definitely takes a bit more effort to work with. Just importing MT entries turned out to be a juggling act and it’s definitely light on out-of-the-box goodies compared to EE.

I will say that the need to edit only one or two templates to handle the entire site is pretty cool and it does appear that there are an ample amount of hacks and plugins to work with, though the user registration system seems pointless unless you want to allow outsiders to post on your blog.

At this point I’d say that EE definitely has a power-user feel to it whereas WP seems a little more focused and unpolished. That shouldn’t surprising, though, considering the difference in price between the two.

Whoa, my attempt to use BBCode and named entities in that last comment didn’t work at all. Hopefully the general point came across, though.

Les: I only found out that I’d gotten approved for the free EE license after I’d already done most of the migration over to WordPress. I guess they got so much response from their “switch” campaign that there was a bit of a delay in getting them all processed.

So far, I can say that I’m favorably impressed with WP. The templating system leaves something to be desired, in that there really isn’t a templating system just a bunch of PHP function calls. Still, this isn’t quite the drawback some people make it out to be. For one thing, PHP is an incredibly useful tool and worth learning on its own merits. For another,
<?php wp_list_cats('sort_column=name'); ?>

is actually easier to remember and use than the MT alternative:

<MTArchiveList archive_type="Category" smarty_pants="1"><li><a href="<$MTArchiveLink$>"><$MTArchiveTitle$></a> (<$MTArchiveCount$>)</li></MTArchiveList>

Handling static pages in WP can be a chore, but if you’re familiar with FTP it shouldn’t be a problem. Personally, I’m looking forward to the day that WP includes a file manager for uploaded files and media—like TypePad and Pivot.

As for the hacks vs. plugins issue, the difference is mainly one of editing a special text file versus uploading something into a special directory. “Hacks” are user-created PHP functions that you can add to a special
my-hacks.php

file in your root directory. Plugins, by contrast, are each discrete files that do a single thing and are uploaded into a plugins directory (and then appear in a Plugin management interface where they can be activated and deactivated).

Hope that helps.

As for EE, I may still make use of it for a more complex multi-author site I’m thinking of launching. I’ll have to move to a new host that offers me more than 2 databases first, however, since I’m sticking with MT for my photoblog.

My, but we bloggers sure do come up with some arcane ways to burn our spare time.

I’ve been playing with EE a bit more to see how easy it would be to convert one of my templates over to it. Turns out that templating and the concept of multiple blogs works a little differently than it does under MovableType so that took some getting used to. Still, you can see a preliminary version of Momma’s Corner in EE here. The left navigation bar looks a little odd because I just cut and pasted the bar from the default template over. It also shows that I was right about being able to pull data from several different blogs as the navigation bar is pulling it’s data from Jenkins Online and not Momma’s Corner because I didn’t change the code to tell it to do otherwise.

I also figured out that I needed to add a new “member group” to limit what my mom would have access to when she logs in. Still, it imported everything and is working. Still not positive that I’ll use EE, but at least I’ve established what I can do with the templating engine and it has some amazing possibilities.

Etan, drop me an email if you want any help or have any questions.

Matt, thanks for the heads up on the hacks. The “since last visited” one would definitely be of interest to me. I still need to look at if “hacks” are the same as “plugins” or will I need to re-hack WP everytime I upgrade? I’d like to avoid altering the source code as much as I can for simplicity’s sake.

WP offers comment feeds for every entry, as well as feeds for each author, category, sub-category, and searches. Each feed is available as RSS .92, 1.0, 2.0, or Atom. Alex King has a neat “since last visited” hack. Just FYI for the blogs you end up using WP on.

I started tonight, ran into a few problems so I am going to give it a while before I make the full move.

Your entries on Movable Type have actually been quite interesting to me.  I don’t use the blogging software on my journal site, save for sites like Haloscan and SiteMeter, but I can see the benefits of MT and WordPress, and would certainly use them if coding wasn’t a “hobby” of mine.

I also hate the thought of spending money when I don’t have to, lol.  Usually, if I can’t get something to work, I can guilt trip my husband into doing it, especially if it would require money for my solution.

These entries are interesting because I like finding out what bloggers are using and the features they’re getting.  Unfortunately, the more popular software gets, the more expensive it gets in most cases.

I’ve seen a lot of people moving over to cheaper software since this was announced by Six Apart.  I wonder how much, if any, impact this will have on them.

The docs that came with EE should provide you with all the info you need. Also as a registered license holder you’ll have access to the support forums at the pMachine site to ask questions and look up how others are doing things.

Word has it that since 1.0 was just released they’re working on their first add-in module for EE which will be a Photo Gallery with the possibility of a Forum module to follow that.

Les, if what you said is true then my night tonight will be spent converting TooMuchSexy to EE. I hope it goes well.