Amazing information architect and interaction designer, Donna Maurer, dumped Movable Type after 5 year relationship for WordPress.
You may recognize Donna’s work on the iA Summit site or maybe experienced one of her sessions at numerous IA, design, web events in Australia. I’m so excited that she is now using WordPress!
After struggling for over an hour getting MT installed with a new hosting provider, when the “pretty grand” WordPress ‘5-minute install’ beckoned, “the camel’s back broke”, she writes:
From a simple, useful, usable blogging tool in 2002 MT had become a bloated, useless, unusable tool in 2008. I could no longer use it.
I deleted the MT files from my server (another hour) and changed to WordPress. In 15 minutes I had installed, configured and imported my content. I resigned myself to the fact that I’d have to build a redirect file, which ended up taking much less time than the stuffing around with MT.
I won’t be going back to MT any time soon. Perhaps never. The ridiculous amount of complexity and lack of flexibility just proved too hard. They’ve completely lost me. I’m now a wordpress girl through and through. And happy being so.
Although, there is much emotion in her comment — MT hardly being useless and unusable — I can understand her frustrations.
Our own frustrations with software is why we, the WordPress development community, strive so hard for a focused WordPress experience that matches most people’s needs and expectations, but that is infinitely extensibility and customization.
As Donna continues to become familar with WordPress, I look forward to the problems she uncovers with WP and the possibility of her helping us develop solutions. I’m also eager for her insights as the next version of WordPress is planned to beta within the next couple of months with a significantly improved experience (admin) designed by Liz Danzico and the Jeffrey Zeldman’s Happy Cog team.
Thanks Lloyd. The thing that I didn’t highlight in my post was that I have been using WP since around version 1.2 for various things – a dead book review site, the IA Summit blog for a couple of years & recently rebuilt my business site on it. I should have moved my blog years ago, but really didn’t want to break all those links!
And thanks for all the good inward links
Hi Donna,
I am totally new to blogging though I understand your frustration. Funny thing is, I was frustrated using word press! I guess it’s because I’m so new to it. As a matter of fact, I stumbled across this site in my search for some word press advice.
This goes out to Donna or Lloyd or anyone else who reads this:why is word press “easier” to use? What is the main advantage to using a word press blog?
I had trouble just trying to reconfigure my template. It seems so “not user friendly” to a newbie! Oh my goodness what a headache I got from messing around with WP. Yet, everyone says the same thing…that WP is the way to go.
Will the new admin panel be more user friendly to newbies? What will the change be?
This is a wonderful site and I’m going to put it in my favorites. Hopefully someone will reply to my comments and questions.
Chris
Donna’s work on the iA Summit site was wonderful.Even me making the move from MT to WordPress was tough.But now i don’t regret the move.It has really made publishing real easy
.