Recently, during my downtime, I’ve been slowly migrating the blog to a new system 1 doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what that system is 😉
The “move” wasn’t really prompted by one being superior over the other (i.e. MT vs WP). Truth be told, while migrating it became very clear to me that MovableType was by far the more superior system simply by the way it tackles data-flow processes. The best analogy I could give now is similar to why I still use Windows for my audio recording when I use OS X for everything else: because it’s more practical.
PC audio apps are cracked left and right whereas OS X audio apps aren’t as easy to find. Take out the whole piracy aspect out of it, and we have a similar situation: WordPress has more plugins being developed than MovableType 2 or at least the plugins I use. I initially wanted to upgrade to MT 4.x, but when I looked for the plugins I considered to be indispensable, I found that WordPress was the better choice.
I’ll do another post for my opinion regarding the switch; for now, let me just welcome you to the new system by pointing out the changes.
I tried my best to make it a seamless transition as far as the visual user-experience goes. So if you don’t pay much attention to little details, you probably won’t notice any change – and that would be a good thing.
But for the curious here’s the lowdown:
Home Page
- Collapse/Expand button eliminated
In the old system, you were able to see the fulltext from the home page of the two latest posts by using the expand/collapse button. Unfortunately, due to the limitations of WP, I couldn’t get them to work. - Simplified Calendar/Archive listing
This is actually a step-back from the old system, much less functionality and visual formatting. But I guess the consolation is that it looks less cluttered because of it. - Twitter tweets
In place of the now gone “detailed” archive section, we now have a listing of my latest tweets on Twitter.
Individual post entry page
- Share post
This was primarily done because the cross-posting plugins are hard to control (they post even at every revision). So I decided to just do it semi manually; by using the AddToAny service. It also has the added bonus of any reader being able to link to my entries easily to their own site. - Comments Area
- Slightly improved comment reading area in the sense that posts made by me are now in a different color scheme; which makes looking for answers easier on an active thread.
- The new comment form is much improved from the old one. It still retains the whole expand/collapse and live-preview features I put on the old system. But now it has a much better anti-spam engine. And from what I can tell, WordPress now applies the markdown syntax support completely in the comments as well (but don’t quote me on that)
- Commenters now have a chance to edit their comments right after they post them. Everyone is given a 5 minute grace-period for making any last minute changes – this should be a boon for trigger-happy people like me who type away without noticing mistakes in their comments.
- More reliable related posts
The reason why I called the section “Probably Related” was because of how awful the MT plugin matched entries. WP’s similar posts plugin seems to do a much better job to merit the official “Related Posts” header, but I’ve grown fond of the old wording 😉
Archives
Lots of changes here, but mostly due to limitations of WP. Overall, it still does the same job – only in a different manner.
- Yearly archive is gone
- No more top “quick links” on the category archives
- Like in the home page, the expand/close buttons on the daily archives are now gone 🙁
- Sidebar content changed
Globally Affected
- Permalink format is now changed from
/archives/YYYY/MM/YYYY_MM_DD_HHMM(AM/PM).phpto/archives/YYYY/MM/DD/sanitized-title. Don’t even get me started on this one! - 404 pages
The site is now using 2 sets of 404 pages. In particular, when you hit a 404 in the blog, it will try to suggest some posts while throwing an error (which makes it an even more helpful page than before) - CSS tweaked a bit
I’m only mentioning this because during the migration, I think some formatting was lost… so you may see some broken old pages (formatting-wise) here and there. If you spot any of that ugliness, please email me a link to the page so I can adjust the code or the CSS to accommodate. - And how could I forget! If you have an iPhone or iPod touch… try viewing this blog 😉
That’s about it 🙂 Welcome to Nargalzius 7.1 😀
Wow congratulations! Did you have any trouble transferring all those years’ worth of blog posts? I think I’ll miss your “Same day different year”.
I myself want to move to WP but the process is still too tedious for me (a nice guy developed a plugin for Rapidweaver to use with WP, for free). And I don’t think there’s a quick way to transfer my old blog posts into the new system.
The edit comment option is nice.
Paano pala yung links mo in Multiply? You’re not gonna change them anymore?
Hi Ria,
About the details of the transfer, I’ll be doing another post on that 😉 I’ve been drafting the entry ever since I’ve started the migration, so I’m pretty sure they’ll answer your questions related to system migration.
But for a quick answer, it’s quick to transfer the blog entries… the thing that takes long is configuring system specific stuff (e.g. tags, etc.) but the content itself is probably the easiest part of the transition.
The Same Day Different year MAY return, it can be done manually kse, pero hassle lang… so siguro pag meron ako oras to really sit down and mull about it, I’ll implement it to WP.
Spoke too soon, I hacked another plugin to give me the same functionality 🙂 “Same day, different year” is back! Edited the post accordingly.
Cool! Natatawa kasi ako sa Same Day Different Year, sometimes when I see a blog post there that I’ve read before, I go, “What the… That can’t have been 2 years ago!” Or 1 year ago, etc., haha. Time flies. Sige I’ll stay tuned for your more detailed entries about the transfer – I’m sure I won’t be able to understand ALL of it, but I’ll learn something new for the day nevertheless. 🙂