It’s almost subtle enough to be unnoticeable, but I’ve switched the software that powers my weblog from MovableType to WordPress.

Ever since Six Apart released their new licensing agreements for MT 3.0, people have been griping and a fair number of bloggers (including some high profile blogs) have switched over to WP. But I’ve been using MT 3.0 since the beta testing started and I was pretty happy with the performance; and I had previously contributed money to MT, so I would have received a discount on my license.

The reason that I’m switching is because I grew tired of waiting for MT to rebuild pages and having to decipher confusing Perl plug-in code. This weblog was previously (before MT) dynamically powered by my own homegrown PHP/MySQL CMS. But rather than go back to those scripts, I decided to go with an open-source software solution that has a growing community of developers behind it (which hopefully I can contribute to).

But switching back to a PHP/MySQL setup has not been smooth sailing. Luckily it’s much easier for me to develop my own plug-ins in PHP than Perl, because I’ve had to create several so far to format my blog the way I want. Most of the templating functions that WP does include output the data (often formatted with HTML tags that I don’t want and can’t configure) instead of returning it for use as a variable. And because of the lack of multiple blog support (i.e. using the same MySQL table the way MT does), I had to convert all my Quicklinks to a category on my main blog.

I’m enjoying poking around with WP — but if you’ve got a tricked-out MT installation, I’d recommend waiting until a more robust version of WP is released.