One year ago today, I switched to WordPress from Movable Type. At the time, I was attracted by three things:


  1. WordPress' GPL license seemed increasingly attractive as Six Apart, the company behind Movable Type (who currently owns LiveJournal) seemed to be constricting users' rights in order to increase revenue.

  2. At the time of my switch, the version of Movable Type that I was running generated static HTML pages for each entry. While this was fine for smaller blogs, as I began to post more entries and attempt to make blog-wide changes, the time wasted in "rebuilding" these static pages increased. WordPress, on the other hand, created dynamic pages.

  3. WordPress uses PHP. Movable Type uses Perl. While I am reasonably familiar with both languages, I find PHP easier to understand (especially when looking at "strange" code that other people have written). I think this is because Perl is easier to obfuscate, but it might be because I am simply more comfortable working with PHP.


I had done some research beforehand (I think this post on Slashdot was the inflection point, with its informative links to the Blog Software Breakdown and Mark Pilgrim's post on why Movable Type's licensing changes were important), so I was reasonably sure that WordPress would be a good fit for me.

However, I did not expect using WordPress to be quite so simple to use. The update to version 1.5 made it especially powerful. This combination has served me well for a year, and I look forward to using it in the next 12 months. As a sign of my gratitude, I donated $36.50 ($365 would have been too much, and $3.65 too little) to WordPress.