I've moved to WordPress

After spending more time hacking up the source than I had ever anticipated, this entire site (both public and private) has been completely moved over to WordPress (from Movable Type). Those of you out there who have made such a transition realize what a large undertaking it can be and my case was certainly no exception; starting out with WordPress and using a default template is one thing, but transparently moving over a complicated, customized, content-heavy weblog is an entirely different matter altogether.

Like everyone else it seems, I’ve been rather impressed with WordPress and can’t wait to delve deeper into it and contribute to the community that has sprung up around it. I put a lot of time and effort into writing tutorials, HOW-TOs, and general tips and tricks for Movable Type and plan do the same for WordPress as soon as I get efficient with it (on a related note, I think I’m going to compile my Movable Type ‘how-to’ entries and present them in a single post here for those who are just getting started with that system).

The Transition

The goal was to keep everything looking and working exactly the same as before, and for the most part, I accomplished that. After familiarizing myself with the basic layout and structure of the CMS, I looked at the source of various themes to further wrap my head around this monster.

After getting the initial site-wide template up and running I spent a fair amount of time hacking htaccess files. I was kicking and screaming there for a while — fixing one thing was breaking something else and on more than a few occasions I thought I had fixed everything only to find something not working quite right as I started to dig around. Sometime in the next few days I’ll put up a post outlining my mod_rewrite solution. That said, everything should be good to go now (and all old URIs should seamlessly redirect), but if you notice any problems, please let me know.

All that’s really left to do is to modularize with PHP includes; I think I had twice as many template modules in my Movable Type installation than I had actual templates (I like to simplify and condense!).