I’ve decided to begin work on moving this site to WordPress for the time being. A new template will be created specifically for that site, and I’ve already imported the old entries into WordPress for testing. For the moment this is only a test to see how well WordPress handles a site of this size and how well I like the interface. The biggest drawback I can see is that WordPress 1.2 doesn’t have as good a comment spam protection system as the current system I use for MT (Jay Allen’s indispensible MT Blacklist). Fortunately WP 1.2 does have some comment spam protection, but I’m not sure how well it will handle the deluge of crap I get every day.
You can see a preview of this site on WordPress at http://www.jayreding.com/wordpress/. Right now the entries from up to yesterday have been imported, and the site is running on the default WordPress template. The import process was almost painless, and it shouldn’t be terrifically difficult to create a redirect to make sure old permalinks continue to work.
I’m split so far. I’ve had nothing but good experiences with MT, and it’s a very powerful and extensible program. However, I don’t want to pay a large sum of money for a license, as this site is a hobby for me. If I were making serious money off this site, then I wouldn’t hesitate to buy a license, since I only have one author and two blogs (the live blog you’re reading now, and a beta blog used to test and debug layouts) so far.
At the same time, if I go with WordPress I have some features like integrated blogrolling that MT doesn’t have, and I never have to worry about license changes since the WordPress code is under the GPL and anyone can create a fork from it if the developers decide to go elsewhere or change the license terms like Six Apart did. Plus, one of the big reasons I went with MT was the developer community, and I fear Six Apart has alienated many people who were working on extending MT as a platform.
I could easily understand Six Apart making an MT Pro version and charging their current rates for it. I had planned to buy such a version when it came out to help support development of MT. However, given that I’d now be paying a large amount of money for fewer features, it’s just not a sound decision for me to purchase an MT license right now.
If Six Apart clarifies their license or offers some strong incentives to upgrade, I’ll certainly consider MT 3.0. Elsewise, this site may join the many who have made the switch from MT’s proprietary lockdown to the wide-open licensing of WordPress.
