Design looks great. I'm seriously considering using WordPress for the group-blog-to-be that should kick off next month some time. Have you heard any complaints or caveats about WordPress?

Well, in contrast to MT, WordPress uses php to create dynamically produced pages. In other words, the server creates the pages "on the fly" by drawing different elements from the database, as required.

Movable Type has fixed templates. If you, say, add a link to your front page, you have to tell the server to rebuild that template. That can be very hard on the server. If you're deleting a lot of comment spam, apparently the stress on a server can be noticable. (As for comment spam, I have the impression that WordPress does a bit better than Movable Type.)

I've heard different things about the stress on servers. Some people say that WordPress's dynamic page rendering is itself a bit harder on the server. Others say that MT's requirement that you rebuild the templates is harder. I suppose it depends on how often you rebuild the templates.

If I were you, I would use WordPress, especially if you're not planning to import anything. But of course I really don't know what I'm talking about anyway.

Daniel: Using WP for multi user blogs is fairly nice. Getting it to work *just* right for each specific installation usually requires a little bit of php hacking, but if you know much PHP, it's pretty easy. I know, I'm running my own multi-user blog now.

Chris: Yes, WP does "rebuild" the page every visit compared to the long, server hard rebuilds of MT. However, by using a plugin for WP called "WP-Statictize", WP will create static versions of pages on the fly and essentially act like MT by creating static pages, just in a slightly different (note: better ;-) ) way.

Finally, keeping the old site structure around for a move would probably not be so hard with some snazzy "mod_rewrite" hacking :D

Cool. Thanks, Jeff.

Oh yeah, another thing. Kerim over at Keywords just switched from Movable Type to WordPress. For technical assistance, he had a good experience with Blog barter.

I just switched!

The only bugs I'm ironing out are url issues unrelated to WP.

I love it so far.

Nathan,

Cool. Looks very nice.

Daniel,

Nathan's blogging needs approximate yours more closely than my teachign blog does, so his experience counts for that much more. As you probably know, he's running a much higher-traffic multi-author blog. I'm curious to hear if he runs into any troubles down the road.

I'm working on a mult-blog version of WP and expect to release an alpha-quality version in a few days.
It also uses Smarty for template support but doesn't as yet make any use of Smarty caching.

"As for comment spam, I have the impression that WordPress does a bit better than Movable Type."

If you use WP in combination with Kitten's Spam tool plugins, you get fantastic comment spam moderation. I can delete a comment, flag it as spam, add the IP, email address, and some keywords to the spam words list with a single click of the button. The tool is intelligent enough to delete duplicates from the spam words list, as well. Additionally, Kitten created a "retrospaminator" which will go back through all of you old comments looking for any you may have missed.

mookitty.co.uk/devblog/ is where you will find those tools.

Hey Chris - thanks for the post! I've referenced it in my weblog all about learning How to Blog. It's essentially me writing about my experiences in teaching myself to blog, and how to go about picking the right tool for the job. I've got a post comparing the major blogging tools, from TypePad, Blogger, MovableType, b2evolution, blosxom, and WordPress, and your post, the comments to it, as well as comments I've received from others, are leading me towards thinking that WordPress is going to be the best way to go. So far I've created different blogs on Blogger, TypePad, using MovableType, and WordPress. I've only just started exploring the WordPress interface, and haven't even tried customizing the templates yet, but the UI is fantastic, install shockingly simple, and, as you mentioned, developer community suprisingly active. I'll have to play around with it *quite* a bit more before I can say for sure that it's my blogging tool of choice, and I've got to at least give b2evolution and blosxom a try, but I'm feeling quite excited about WordPress's potential at this point! Thanks!

> "any complaints or caveats about WordPress?"

About the only thing I can think of is that the switch might be a little more complex if you use multiple blogs (as opposed to multiple-user blogs) in MT, which is a little harder to set up (but still possible) in WP. And people like Donncha (above) are working on stuff like this all the time.

I personally moved from MT to WP a little while back and found it very, very easy to do, but then, I only have the one blog running on my install.