Hmm – WordPress, MT, PHP, Perl, bleah

I’ve been taking a look at WordPress recently, in preparation for the upgrade which should be coming in the next few days (when my contact at my hosts gets back from holiday – being the difficult chap I am, I want to physically change servers as well, and this needs some personal attention).

WordPress is a GPLed blogging system that uses PHP and MySQL. I’m not inherently opposed to PHP, but I don’t know it particularly well, and I find that whenever I try to learn bits I start getting the syntax mixed up with Perl syntax. Now, if I was going be writing in one or the other that would be okay, but I tend to write a reasonable amount of Perl, not just on my site but also offline on my computer for local use, shuffling files around, making image galleries and so on. You just can’t use PHP for that – well, not easily, anyway.

Movable Type is written in Perl but builds static files of whatever sort you want – HTML, SHTML which I use, PHP if you like. That does mean it’s a bit more adaptable. You can modify an MT blog only knowing HTML, as long as you’re familiar with MT’s internal language of tags as well, which is not complicated. You have to at least be familiar with PHP syntax to tinker with WordPress, though from what I can see you don’t have to learn any special syntax apart from that, just know how the WordPress PHP modules work and insert them in the correct places.

At first I thought the former setup was more adaptable but I’m coming round to the idea that the latter has elegance. You’re only using one language for the whole thing and the gap between the application and the blog itself is much smaller. If you know PHP it should be much easier to really hack into the way the blog operates – in MT you have to write Perl modules and understand how the MT system interacts with those.

I’ve also been thinking I should get more familiar with PHP anyway, it’s a useful skill and loads of people use it, and I’ve always said that the only way to learn a new language is to have a project to use it with, so using WordPress might be a good opportunity, if I can restrain myself from writing any Perl for a bit.

Amazing. I’ve managed to change my entire attitude in the course of three paragraphs. Don’t anyone call me inflexible. Before I go any further I’d like to issue this disclaimer.

Warning: the following comments are based on my very limited survey of how WordPress works. As with all things stated on Light From An Empty Fridge, they may not be accurate at all. If you know they aren’t, though, I’d love you to tell me why, because I’m trying to learn about this thing.

Okay. In many ways it looks like WordPress is a better solution for the novice blogger – it automates a lot of things that MT doesn’t, for instance, link lists. MT is still rather stuck in the Blogger paradigm of internal code, where you have a blog that produces output and that’s it. If you’re a bit experienced in web-hacking-about then you can find lots of ways to embed blogs in other blogs, but for everyone else you have to go in and write raw HTML in your page, and republish.

Oh yeah, publishing. I’m in two minds about the publishing thing. On the one hand, MT having to create half-a-dozen new pages each time you put in a new entry does slow things down. On the other hand, I’m not in love with WordPress’ central requirement that every time someone wants to look at a page, it has to go through the entire process of building it. It’s not processor-friendly and it’s not search-engine-friendly. Probably with a relatively small site like mine the efficiency point isn’t going to make much difference, but one of the reasons I switched from a dynamic system (Livejournal) to a static building system (MT) was that I wanted better page rankings. I wouldn’t be first for “kilroy is a cunt” any more, certainly given that the original page would disappear.

I must say that Googling for various terms does produce a number of results derived from WordPress blogs, so it can’t be that crippling for ratings. I guess I’ll see.

I’m also a bit wary of losing the ability to produce different kinds of page – a monthly archive list that looks like a list of titles and summaries, which is how it looks at the moment, rather than a full list of all posts… I like MT’s ability to generate anything. But perhaps with a bit of hacking that won’t be a problem. I haven’t really seen enough WordPress blogs yet to say.

Ech. I’ve just realised that I’ll have to completely reinstall all the options in MT, all the archiving, all the templates and the paths… bah.

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If you’re wondering why I’m even thinking of migrating, take a look at the trackback carnival that is “It’s About Time“, announcing the move of MT from free for non-commercial use to paid. My own trackback will doubtless be appearing at the bottom soon, and it won’t be the last. I already made a $20 donation to Six Apart for Movable Type, seemed only fair considering that their software powers almost all of my site now, but the huge number of people who mentioned WordPress got me interested in the subject. And it is GPLed, open source stuff, after all. I can’t use it right now because I don’t have any SQL on my server right now, one of the reasons MT is so slow, I probably mentioned this, but after the upgrade I will. So why not?

I doubt that any of this will affect any reader at all.