Moving Movable Type to Drupal.
Moving Movable Type to Drupal
Well anyone who's into blogging and more than a bit geeky would probably like this one. It's a description of how one user moved from Movable Type to Drupal, step by step. Nicely done !
Why migrate
I migrated my MT blog to Drupal. It wasn't easy to make this decision, because I became used to the ease of use that came with MT in terms of setting up, administering, and blogging. I simply found that MT was lacking in some of the features and scalability I need, particularly with regard to classification and news feed aggregation. Since I've been using Drupal for the past year and extolling its features, I decided to eat my own dog food and use Drupal for my personal site. This way I can contribute to its development because I'll be looking at it more from the back side.
Migrating was not exactly for the PHP/MySQL novice — which I consider myself — so I wanted to document my experience for others who might consider the same move. I encourage anyone who decides to go with Drupal to please consider becoming part of the development list and get involved with helping evolve the application. Drupal is a very programmer-centric application at the movement, catered to technical people, but if non-technical people or people who demmand ease of use and usbility begin to add their voice to the development list, perhaps the administration experience will improve. I hope to throw some time into making these types of contributions in the future.
So here's how I migrated (this is being updated presently): [_Go_]
It's definitely worth reading. And I've added his blog to my favorites so I make sure to follow it. His comments about moving to Drupal for the news aggregator are on point (here's a tutorial on it I wrote). Beyond the news aggregator, an additional useful tool is that the blogroll is dynamic and shows you how recently the blog was updated. That's often more than enough to tell you to read it.
His points about Drupal becoming more usable are definitely on point — but they are a very big concern of the project and we're pushing to get them addressed. This brings up a very good point about open source: we tend to like to make people happy. Just like anyone else and the “squeaky wheel gets the grease”. If people start complaining about something (usability) then it tends to get addressed — particularly if the project is user driven as is Drupal. Our user base to this point has been more technical and that's affected what we work on. Now its getting more end userish and that will be reflected. I've talked with the one of the project leaders on this and he definitely gets it.