I know I’ve been rather quiet lately. I’m working on a couple of new projects that I can’t talk about yet but that I should be able to talk about soon (one within a couple of weeks and another within a couple of months). Between these extra-curriculars, some articles I’m writing, and an impending move to a beautiful house in the Berkshires, I’ve been falling behind on the blog posting thing. I will probably continue to be sporadic through the end of August.
In the meantime, the one thing I can talk about now is my research into moving to WordPress. I’ve wanted to make the move for quite some time. ExressionEngine is a fine platform, but if you’re just looking for blogging and not so much for a CMS, then you just can’t beat WordPress for its maturity and pace of continuing development. The trouble has been that it would have cost me too much money to migrate, since I don’t have the skills to do my own programming and page design.
Luckily, there’s some good news for me:
- While there still isn’t a built-in ExpressionEngine import tool, there are a few utilities floating around that will get me most of the way there.
- Between new themes, new plugins, and new widgets, I’ve been able to get a test WordPress installation to do about 90% of the things that my current setup can do (and a bunch of things it can’t do) with no programming.
- There are tons of cheap WordPress hosting options that work even for non-techies like me–particularly since the amazing Fantastico installer that many ISPs now provide includes a WordPress installer.
So, while it will still probably cost me some money to make the migration (particularly if I want to get some help to make sure all current EE links get auto-forwarded to their new WordPress URLs), it’s looking increasingly affordable.
I’ll keep you posted.
Sounds like fun! Good luck with the move — both virtual and real!
Can you compare WordPress with Expression Engine more? I’m interested in the differences, because I have several EE enthusiast friends who often tell me if I like WordPress, then I’ll love Expression Engine. Why did you switch from EE to WordPress?
Hi Tom,
Sorry–your posts were initially flagged as spam by my automated filters. I like to let people comment without the burden/annoyance of logins and captchas, but in order to do so I have to keep my spam filtering set relatively aggressively.
At any rate, I have no real complaints against ExpressionEngine; it was a fine platform. The main reason I switched was that, as a non-programmer who likes to add bells and whistles for my blog, it was much easier for me to add new functionality by drawing on the rich library of plug-ins available for WordPress. If you need content management beyond blog functionality, or if you are a developer yourself, it may well be that EE will suit your needs better. I’m not really in a position to evaluate from those perspectives.