Some of the my considerations before choosing to switch from :mt: to a different blogging engine.
Currently, :mt: generates a static file for each post I publish (strictly speaking, actually this is a number > 1 since I use all of :mt:’s archiving features and each archiving method generates one file). On PHP-based systems, each post that is stored in the database is pulled out and reformatted on-the-fly appropriately depending on user requests. As a result, there is no delay in publishing. Furthermore, there is the option of publishing at a specific time.
Another benefit is that all of the systems I am considering are GPL’ed. This means that, apart from free for use, I can charge people from my own versions or support, for example – not that it’s important now though. The source codes are also accessible should I ever want to look at them.
At present I am leaning towards b2evolution, which while more feature-rich compared to its sibling :wp: is really lacking in the documentation department. Also, I guess I just don’t have the patience to try to understand the Skin+Template framework of both NucleusCMS and Blog:CMS.
However, some of the things I will miss at least for the time being (until hopefully they are implemented in future) are: different ways of archiving (by week, by month, by categories, etc. which you can quickly discover by browsing through my site) which I gather is a pain to maintain in PHP-based systems, and the ability to generate static posts.
Now, finally the possible steps to a successful migration: 😉
- Try out everything on my desktop PC. By using a WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP) called YellowTip Web Server (free), I have been able to install all of the packages listed above very easily onto my PC. Incidentally, there are more free packages like this out there.
- Import existing entries in :mt: into the new engine and hope that minimal work is required to reformat the existing data. 😀
- Customisations of CSS – if I still have energy left!
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