Pondering a move back to Movable Type

I don’t know if it’s boredom or what, but for whatever reason I’ve been thinking a lot lately about moving back to Movable Type. Don’t get it twisted — I loveWordPress and have contributed quite a bit to the community, it’s just that, well, I feel something is missing. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but WP has always felt a bit ‘shaky’ to me and I kind of want to see what MT has cobbled together in my absence.

When I first mentioned that I was abandoning MT for WordPress, Anil Dash, now the VP of Professional Products at Six Apart, the company behind MT, e-mailed me to thank me for the contributions I’d made to the MT community and to ask why I was leaving and what they could change to make the product better. Looking back at my responses, it’s funny to see how much they mirror my feelings today, even though I’m contemplating a move in the opposite direction. An excerpt from one of my replies: There wasn’t, per se, anything wrong with it. The time had simply come for me to try something else — I’d become bored I guess.

The challenge

I think part of me just wants to see if this can be done. My WP setup is a very customized one, far removed from the theme system most people use and rife with hacks, workarounds, and one-off plugins (most of which I’ve never released). It will be interesting to see if I can achieve the same with MT. If it turns out to be more trouble than it’s worth, I’ll likely just give up altogether.

I’ll probably install the latest version of MT later today and play around with it some. Hell, I might even try to move all of my entries over just to see how it goes.