Converting to WordPress

Hello again. It’s just me, your friendly neighborhood housekeeper, sweeping six weeks worth of cobwebs from the House of Rapp. Six weeks. I guess I really can walk away from the keyboard, eh?

I’m not addicted.

Really.

I suppose I should have written something when I returned from vacation. It was lovely, by the way. There are about 100 photos from the trip over here. I’d love to write more about it–maybe I’ll backdate some entries from the trip journal Lesley and I kept.

Anyway, among the 1.3 million emails, phone message, faxes, letters, telegrams (okay, maybe not telegrams) waiting patiently for my return was the news that Movable Type was going down the drain. And quickly. So, faced with the need to switch to something less…. uh, expensive, I promptly did nothing for several weeks.

Actually, the problem with Movable Type wasn’t the cost. I don’t mind paying for good software. But I really hate being forced to hitch my web site to a third party product like TypeKey in order to make it work. And whatever your feelings about Movable Type, we can all agree that this is exactly where it’s headed. Eventually I’ll have to upgrade, and since it wasn’t going to be with MT… well, as they say, there’s no time like the present.

As Mark Pilgrim so eloquently pointed out, the eventual utility of all non-free software approaches zero. So I went in search of a new CMS and settled on WordPress after using it on my staging server for the past month or so. I ruled out the large CMS software like Drupal, PostNuke, etc. because I want to pick and choose the stuff that best fits my needs rather than be saddled with a lot of code I’ll never use. I also briefly considered ExpressionEngine before coming to my senses and tapping WordPress, which is distributed under a GNU Public License. In other words, free free free! I can edit, hack, and redistribute the code to my heart’s content. Will I actually do that? Probably not. But I’ll sleep better at night knowing that I can. Not to mention that I’ll never have to do the static “rebuild” bit again.

So that’s my story and I’m sticking with it. So far I’ve got the database moved over, the permalinks rebuilt via mod_rewrite so they’re identical to what I was running under Movable Type, and the major template stuff done. But until I fix the photo gallery and static pages you’ll notice some wonky behavior. Would you expect anything less from the House of Rapp?

That’s what I thought.

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