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: 😉

  1. 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.
  2. Import existing entries in :mt: into the new engine and hope that minimal work is required to reformat the existing data. 😀
  3. Customisations of CSS – if I still have energy left!