Moveable Type’s Wall?

Looks like Eric NSLog() is "hitting the Moveable Type wall ":http://nslog.com/archives/2004/02/08/movabletype_sucks.php right along with me. MT has a lot going for it: nice UI, ease of use, great community, a standards-friendly attitude, and a whoop-ass API for plugins. So while I certainly wouldn’t say MT “sucks” (Mena and Anil were waaaaaaay too nice in person to talk that kinda smack), it’s got some quirks and limitations.

Static page rendering is foremost amongst those limitations. As Eric points out, having to generate a bunch of pages every time you update your site results in the dreaded N(n) processing time, abhorred in the computer science world as the definition of computational inefficiency. My personal beefs are 1. that MT is written in Perl and I’m thinking in PHP for work these days, and 2. that its XML-RPC implementation seems to drop data and timeout quite a bit. That, and it’s not technically Open Source software.

Eric is right in dreading the idea of migrating to another blog tool, as few of them have easy migration paths from Moveable Type. The transition won’t be pretty, but I’m thinking of moving over to Serendipity, WordPress, or another PHP + MySQL blog tool. I’ll have to write my own migration script if I go with Serendipity, but at least if I do it’s something I can give back to the community.

My main concern is what to do about the archives. I’ll leave them in place, I guess, or whip up a redirect hack to bounce people to the right place.