I just upgraded to Movable Type 5 less than a month ago and I’ve already ditched it and moved my blog to WordPress. Why? Well Movable Type seems to have lost its mojo. It just doesn’t have the same type of community support that WordPress engenders. Not even close. Roughly half of my plugins stopped working after I upgraded. There doesn’t seem to be any plans to fix them. WordPress, on the other hand, has a massive community of developers constantly churning out good plugins. You can basically do anything you want, provided you know a little PHP. which I sort of do.
I have a lot of time invested in Movable Type. I started my blog on it way back in 2003 and I’m very familiar with their proprietary markup language which was simply an extension of HTML. I knew the dashboard backwards and forwards. It was second nature. WordPress is a different animal. It’s all PHP. Blog templates are organized differently. It took some considerable work to convert my Movable Type style to a WordPress theme. It’s not perfect, but close enough, and I can continue to tweak it as I go forward.
I’m slowly getting used the backend interface. In many ways it’s more intuitive than Movable Type and I think it’ll be a good move for me.
Since I upgraded to Movable Type 5, I’ve been bombarded by spam. The Captcha plugin that had been working like a charm in MT4.3 doesn’t seem to work in MT5 and the floodgates were open to a vertiable tsumani of spam.
It’s incredibly annoying to have to deal with these emails and comments. So I searched the MT plugin database and the forums and found MT-Akismet. It’s installed now and I really hope that’s the end of this annoyance.
I finally got around to upgrading to Movable Type 5. It’s got a new interface for the dashboard which I’m still getting used to, but other than that, I don’t see much difference between the old and new. Might be better for integrating blogs into an existing website, but I don’t need to do that. Probably would have been nice to have it when I converted the old Oakland Yellowjackets website into a MT blog. That was a major pain that required countless hours of custom template building. I got it working, but it was too limited for my needs and I ended up redesigning the whole site and moving it over to Joomla. Anyway, I’ve got my plugins and style installed, and I’m good to go.
Spam has basically put the kabosh on whatever community I had on this site. I got so many comments that I had to put up the firewall of registration to stop it and it was just too much for people to register or login in comment. Can’t really blame them.
Now that Facebook is around and my posts here are automatically published on my FB account, whatever comments people tend to have are posted there. It’s sort of annoying as FB is so ephemeral. I suppose you could find all all your posts if you were willing to dig far enough, but what a pain and there’s no searching for them. The posts live for a while on the wall and then, for all intents and purposes, they are gone. That’s just they way it is.
So I don’t know if this is going to bring back commenters to my site, but registration is no longer necessary as I finally got around to installing a “Captcha” to prevent spammers from attacking the site. It’s not going to stop them from trying. It’s just going to stop them from succeeding. A few weeks back I turned off registration after having it in place for a few years and I was bombarded by a mountain of spam comments. I immediately turned it back on. I was defeated, but only momentarily.
The Captcha is sort of ugly, but it only shows up once you start typing your comment. And if it’s going to stop spam, I can live that.
