I had originally written a (really, really) long post to explain why I’ve switched, but decided that I should just make this post really short instead — and promptly deleted the remainder of this post to start over.

Many of you who know me know I’ve been an avid user of Movable Type since I started blogging on my own site (and away from LiveJournal) since 2001. I’ve upgraded every time they announced a new version, participated in beta testing and even tried my hand at writing a plugin for a client project we launched almost two years ago.

I was so comfortable with the platform that I resisted switching to anything else for years.

So why did I switch to WordPress? Here’s a quick list…

It just works
No more fiddling with annoying Perl builds and Perl modules, cgi-bins and random permissions issues where part of the application would just not work because a permission was amiss after an update. No more fiddling with FastCGI to try to get the whole experience a little faster, no more having FastCGI/Perl run out of memory and take down the server with it, no more having to lock-down tagging access because search engine bots were killing my server performance by causing Movable Type to constantly perform lookups. WordPress just installs, and provided you have a modern hosting provider, there’s little you have to do to get it working out of the box. Not to mention, the “Famous 5-Minute Install” is pretty generous. The longest part is waiting for all the application files to intially upload to the server.

FTP goes away after the first upload
The native in-place automatic upgrade and plug-in update system automagically takes care of the nitty-gritty work without the need for FTP clients and uploading the same files over and over again.

The new 2.7 user interface is amazing
From the sleek, collapsible and ever-present sidebar, everything you need is in one navigation bar, and the expandable/collapsible sections remain persistent across sessions. The unified interface theme even crosses into plugin configuration screens (for the most part), and that speaks volumes for a unified user experience. It’s lightweight, responsive and downright fast.

Did I say fast?
No, I really mean fast. The native, integrated Google Gears support lets me cache certain files that the CMS needs, and that cuts down on the requests for the browser to handle when loading CMS pages. Nice.

Excellent iPhone support that’s going to get better
I love that, with the WordPress native iPhone application, I can upload multiple photos from my iPhone and work on local drafts without publishing to the server first. Oh, multiple photos, as in not having to rely on Flickr and the iPhone’s odd one-picture-per-email limitation to post to my blog, or the odd inability to upload photos through a web version of the blogging CMS. The next version of the WordPress iPhone application will add comment and page support, which makes it even better. This will make mobile blogging much more feasible, especially for SXSW in March.

That’s pretty much it in a nutshell. Have I given up on Movable Type? Not at all. I’m excited to see what the next iteration of MT will bring, especially with the community support their open source project is allowing, especially with the forthcoming Motion product. I’m still planning on using MT for one other project, but time will tell. I’ve played in both sandboxes for years with both work and setting up friends’ blogs, so I can continue to play in the same two sandboxes for the next few years.