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.