You've got to rearrange, who you are into who you want to be. And then sha na na a lot.
In the beginning was Geocities, then Blogger, then Movable Type. Now I think it's time to move on. Since I've upgraded to the latest version of MT I've been frustrated. There used to be a much more active community around MT, one that would answer your questions. There used to be plugins that made MT jump through hoops. There used to be decent documentation. Now I find that the forums aren't useful, I can't find plugins to do what I want, when I find them I can't get plugins to work, and much of the time I've spent on the documentation site has caused me to lose what little hair I still possess. (There's lots of legacy documentation still up there, and plenty more that's just plain inadequate.)
In short, I think it's time for a change. Plus, it's always good to learn something new. It seems that my main options are Wordpress, Drupal, and Joomla. Here's what I'm looking for:
1) Can handle the import of 4700+ entries, nearly 10,000 comments, with associated categories, subcategories, and tags.
2) Can handle a multi-author blog.
3) Can replicate my permalink structure (fortunately my current system is "future-proof" so hopefully not a big deal.)
4) Will be useful to learn.
5) Easy to use for authors.
Any thoughts, Ishbapublic?
I'm a big fan of ExpressionEngine. It isn't free, and the design/admin learning curve can be a bit steep at first, but it's very flexible and very powerful. And you get that power without the headaches of building something from scratch. A lot of advanced features you'd have to implement via plugins in WordPress come right out of the box in EE, which also means fewer worries about stability. But again, NOT FREE, which is a deal-breaker for many people.
EE has solid customer support (in-depth documentation and active forums) and a small but responsive user community. I use a single-author setup, but it's designed for multiple users with varying privileges. Check it out.
Comment #1 :: link :: May 28, 2009 1:07 PMI really like EE for new projects, and it hits most of your requirements. The forums are very active and the folks involved are friendly and extremely helpful. But you may have some difficulty keeping your link structure -- unfortunately, EE is not as flexible on that as I'd like. That's the single reason I did not migrate Thudfactor to EE.
It's also more difficult to get EE to the current state of Ish, template and functionality-wise. But if you wanted to take it further than that -- have much more complex layouts, more structured data -- EE is a dozen times better.
Wordpress should suit everything you've listed there. It chugged for me on MediaTemple hosting, but I think that's more MediaTemple's problem than Wordpress's.
I recommend WordPress. Look around and you will find it is already being used for many projects which fit your description. And there is a tremendous development community. Even better, WP seems to keep getting better with each release!
Comment #3 :: link :: May 29, 2009 3:29 AM :: homepage
