Departing from Movable Type?

So the suggestion has been raised by Stacey (web maven, MT pro, and tech support guru at my web host) that I give up on Movable Type and move over to WordPress. The primary motivator here is that periodically (e.g., over the past few weeks), the spammers and black hats and other miscreants slow me (and the server) to a crawl in their spam attacks on the site. MT, because of the way it uses Perl and CGI scripts and all that jazz (insert technical stuff I have a vague sense about) is particularly vulnerable here. The spam doesn’t actually get through, but the system is so swamped fending it off that it chokes off. Non-hilarity ensues.

(I am gratified by the number of emails I’ve received saying, “Hey, there’s something wrong with your system, and I really wanted to comment on this one blog post you have there.” Thanks, folks, it’s always good to know when you’re missed.)

I’ll confess that the thought is not new to me.  I know of other folks who have migrated away from MT for their blogging needs (most to WordPress, others to ExpressionEngine or other platforms, more about which anon), while I know of few who have migrated back here. A lot of that was driven by some of MT’s missteps in licensing, but others were driven by a more vibrant development community on the WP side of things. Certainly it seems easier to find plug-ins and interfaces to WP blogs than MT blogs, much to my occasional frustration.

There’s also a “fresh start” aspect to this that’s appealing — I’ve been wanting to do a major upgrade to my MT installation and templates for some time, and this would be just taking it a few steps further.

There are a few factors I’ll need to consider here. (And I’m doing it in public because, hey, if you can muse about blogging on your own blog, where can you muse about it?) 

First off is the historic factor, i.e., in my 14K posts here, I have a lot of cross-references to other blog posts, and there are likely more than a few links from the outside world to posts I have here, too. I don’t want those to stop working — it’s inelegant and rude and a blow to my own ego.

Stacey’s suggestion was (if I read it correctly) is very straightforward. Import the existing MT entries. Only the front page (index.html) will resolve as the same. Leave the old MT archives there so that any old/internal links will still remain live (I’d rebuild the templates to clue visitors into the “new” version). Block off the scripts that cause fits when the spammers hit them, and I’m right as rain, right? Folks

It’s deceptively simple, though there are a few devils in the details that would need to be resolved. 

1. First off, I do a lot of dynamic publishing in MT — would I need to turn the MT archives and individual files into static entries? (In other words, what-all gets turned off in the MT installation that might cause problems for folks to visit those older pages?)
2. The current MT archives on my main blog are busted (monthly and category). That’s not a big issue, it’s just sloppiness I’m leaving behind. 
3. I make a lot of use of internal trackbacks to cross-reference posts (so it’s not just links going to previous posts, but trackbacks pointing back). Would need to research this on other platforms, as well as consider what sort of long-term clean-up of old links I might want to make.
4. This needs to be done on multiple blogs. That’s just a complexity in the implementation; I don’t necessarily need to do everything all at once (though the site remains vulnerable in the meantime).
5. One of the blogs is BD’s. We’ll need to chat as to whether this is a problem (I’d doubt it, but it will be some new under-the-hood stuff he’d have to learn).
6. Learning curve — I’d have to learn about WP (or whatever), vs what I know about MT (dating back to primeval versions).
7. Most of my blogs are (aesthetic cruft aside) pretty straightforward. WIST, though, is a whole other beast — I’m using all sorts of fields in non-standard ways, and displayed in non-standard ways, and I suspect that the page design and implementation of it into another platform, if possible, will be by far the biggest challenge (certainly it was to originally start).
8. Obviously I’d need to swap out or update all the little tools and widgets and Flickr drivers and so forth. That’s “just” clean-up.

I’d do this in a gradual effort. I have some small blogs off in the background that I’d probably do first, just to get my feet wet. Then I’d probably do Blog of Heroes, BoulderDude, Dave Does the Blog, then WIST.

Of course, all of this would be a huge time sink (any strategic solution here is, of course as well). I have no grasp as yet of what it would take to actually do this thing, but I suspect a few weeks of intense effort, trailing out into a few months to get all the pieces actually migrated and in place. No time like the present, to be sure, but I’m not sure how many of the other things I’m juggling could be put on hold for this.

The other question (beyond “Should I do this?”) is clearly what the target system should be. WordPress seems to be the logical choice, but there are certainly other candidates out there. 

So … assuming people can actually get comments to open and post here … what do all you techie blogger types think?