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If (lastStraw) then (WordPress)

It wasn’t all that long ago that I was a shiny happy user of the Movable Type personal publishing system. I came into MT-ville sometime before the big license kerfluffle in 2004, which seemed rather a tempest in a teapot so far as I was concerned. “Open source” wasn’t part of my vocabulary, and who really reads software license boilerplate anyway? I had no problems with paying for software or support, especially for a tool which I’d be using several times a day, every day. Installing MT was never a joy - indeed, the process seemed rather more difficult and tedious than it had to be - but actually using and maintaining MT3.x seemed well within my set of competencies.

Important note: I’m no designer, no power user, no savvy coder. I’m a personal blogger. I fall into a set of personal bloggers who want an arrangement more flexible than that provided by hosted blogging (Typepad, Blogger, etc), but who also want tools that we can actually use without having to get second degrees (or in my case, a first degree). Movable Type was, at that time, just such a tool, and I enjoyed using it. Still, the program seemed to stagnate a bit over time, and I was rather enthused over the prospects of upgrading from version 3.x to 4.

So now, of course, Waveflux is powered by WordPress.

Life really is what happens when you’re making other plans.

The seeds of the migration to WordPress were planted in the very process of upgrading to Movable Type 4. Money spent on installation support at my webhost - having them perform the upgrade for me - and money spent on troubleshooting support from Six Apart resulted in time lost and an inability to publish dynamically. MT had proven true to form in that each installation had been more difficult than the last. “Frustrated” would be a delicate euphemism for the way I felt by the time the blog was more-or-less functional, but I had decided to face forward. As irritated and wary as I was from the upgrade experience, I was still hopeful about exploring and exploiting MT4. I’d seen the new admin interface, for example, and was wowed.

Unfortunately, that was the last time I felt anything but disappointed and angry regarding my Movable Type installation.

Running the blog using the generic MT templates was fine, if, well, generic…and if you overlooked the time consumed in rebuilding due to static publishing. I decided to defer tackling that handicap in favor of remaking the design. I’d long been considering a magazine-style approach to the layout, something with various departments and features, a change from the standard “tubular” blog style. Prior to the upgrade, I’d strongly considered commissioning a new layout by an MT professional designer. It was an exciting idea, but some number-crunching over the holidays made me realize that excitement would cost more than I could afford. The only remaining options were to 1) make use of some existing and relatively inexpensive set of templates that would work with MT4, or 2) cudgeling an existing design into MT4 compliance myself.

The problem with Option 1 quickly became apparent: there were no such templates available. Nothing that suited my needs, at least. I was surprised, and not in a good way, to find such a dearth of MT4-ready designs, magazine-type or not. Even considering that MT4 had recently been released, the product had been in beta long enough that I’d assumed that MT style mavens would have produced templates for it. Obviously, that assumption was in error.

In annoying contrast, the Web seemed positively awash in WordPress magazine themes. I gave those a lookover and found a few that I liked; one in particular, Thad Allender’s Gridline, really appealed to me. Thus, Option 2: I decided to purchase the template and adapt it to my MT-based blog. I worked up an HTML version of the home page on a test blog. Once I had a basic design in hand for the index page, I set to work on adapting it to the various archive pages.

Here, as they say, is where my troubles began. And ended.

In comparison to MT3.x, the templating arrangement used by MT4 seemed utterly opaque. “Byzantine” is not too strong a term here; it was as though the templates had been blown up and scattered by the winds to distant corners of the earth. I had made use of modules and includes in my previous customized templates, but was in no way prepared for the complexity of the new system. Div soup - as the default 3.x templates had occasionally been described - had given away to a goulash of includes, modules, and conditional statements whose rhyme and reason were not clearly explained.

It was this lack of clear guidance, of plain explanation of fundamental changes, that infuriated me - complexity is one thing, but being thrown into a dense forest without a map is something else altogether. It was, after the rigors of an unsatisfying upgrade, the last straw.

After finding few helpful resources and trying in vain to decipher the goat entrails of MT4’s templating, it finally came to me on a Friday night: switching to another platform couldn’t possibly be any harder than wrestling with Movable Type. It’s the sort of realization that one might resist because of all that one has invested in the system one knows. But that was the rub: I didn’t know this system anymore. Whatever I had invested in MT, whatever familiarity I had with the way it worked, had flown out the window the moment I upgraded to version 4. So I bought a copy of Lisa Sabin-Wilson’s WordPress for Dummies the next day, spent Saturday and Sunday reading the relevant chapters, and set up a trial WP installation. Almost immediately, I applied the Gridline theme and began tweaking it. I had feared the unfamiliarity of PHP, which I understood only on a rather elementary level, but those fears were overblown. Working with WordPress was easy. It was as easy, in fact, as working with Movable Type had been prior to the upgrade.

A day or so later, I exported the Waveflux content to the WP blog, holding my breath as I did so. It was, again, easy. Entries, comments, everything came over.

I had worried about breaking existing incoming links floating around in the digital ether. But I found a clearly written htaccess rule, tweaked it, and marveled at how seamlessly it worked.

And then, with a certain amount of satisfaction, I blew up the Movable Type installation.

And here we are.

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It is possible - not certain, but possible - that I would not have made this change had Six Apart prepared the ground for ordinary Joe personal bloggers like myself. The real absence of guides to the new templating arrangement is a killer; less so, but still a real obstacle, is the dearth of version 4-ready templates and designs. I can readily understand that many people in a position to produce such material had been busy working on simply getting the product ready to ship, but knowing that doesn’t help me in my position as a user.

Resources where I might have expected to find guidance were disappointingly bare. Again, I understand that people have lives and are busy with projects I know nothing about. But - again- that doesn’t help me as an MT user.

It’s clear that the paradigm gulf between versions 3 and 4 of Movable Type was simply not considered by Six Apart. Bad enough, but the really irritating aspect of this was the desultory response to user confusion. “Download Template Hammer and poke around in the code” does not constitute guidance.

Now, perhaps, we may see some changes in this regard…though not in time for me. I’ll confess that seeing very recent posts like this one at the MT Community Blog produced a wee bit of irritation. “Kinda late, guys,” I thought.

In fairness, I have to acknowledge that many people successfully navigated their way through the Scylla and Charybdis of MT4’s new schema. Excellent for them, and for 6A. A pity I wasn’t among them.

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In one sense, the relationship with the blogging platform of our choice is probably more emotional than it should be. These are tools, after all. But the value inherent in any tool derives entirely from its use; insofar as weblogs represent an extension of self, an avenue for expression, I guess it makes sense that we take these platforms personally.

So when they no longer work for us, we take that personally, too.

It’s not possible for me to cut ties with Movable Type without feeling somewhat chagrined. MT introduced me to blogging, and as I said above, I had a lot invested in it, or at least felt that I had. But I didn’t change; the tool that I had been using changed. I was obliged to find another, one that didn’t provide a series of frustrations. Feeling lost and stupid is an experience I can easily get from an art opening, a music store, or any Coen brothers movie*. I don’t need it from my blogging platform.

Moving on, then.

*Fargo notwithstanding.

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