I used Textpattern to power my blogs since the summer of 2004. But after taking another look at WordPress recently, and stumbling on a template I loved (Hemingway), I’ve decided to make the leap from Textpattern back to WordPress.

I still love Textpattern. In some ways, I think it is much more intuitive and, with the aid of plugins, tremendously flexible and powerful. Also, the Textpattern community is outstanding, very responsive and helpful. But WordPress offers a number of features out-of-the box that make it very attractive. For example, you can preview a post with the actual published formatting as you’re composing, it’s easier to switch layout templates (just upload the template folder), static pages are easier to create, and you can post by email.

Moving from Textpattern to Wordpress is a bit of an ordeal. You can use a built-in Textpattern importer to move your posts, but I had to move my Textpattern tables from my Textpattern database into my WordPress database before importing (I used a Textpattern to WordPress Import Script from Technosailor, but I think the default importer would have worked as well). Also, I had to copy my txp_discuss table, edit it, and import it to get my comments (then I had to edit the post ID numbers to match the originals so the comments would match up and my URLs would remain the same). A hassle, but I’m up.

There are still a number of glitches, so some posts may look a bit bonkers. I’ll be going through them in the next week or so to clean them up. Some of the formatting may be off and some of the links broken. And I’m sure I’ll be tweaking the Hemingway template before I’m satisfied.