I decided to drop Movable Type and move over to WordPress instead. I was sick of the whole “rebuilding static pages” process of Movable Type. The problem is that integrating WordPress into my current site would be a pain in the ass. So I decided to take the easy way out and instead move the whole site over to WordPress and take advantage of the static pages feature for the rest of the site.

This takes a lot of the burden off of my shoulders in a number of ways:

  • I don’t have to worry about my lack of creativity, I’ll let the theme designers take care of it for me
  • I don’t have to worry about always maintaining valid XHTML, I’ll let the theme designers take care of it for me
  • I don’t have to worry about maintaining the AJAX and fixing the “slow responding pages” bug, I’ll let the theme designers take care of it for me
  • I don’t have to worry about maintaining the javascript navbar, I’ll let the theme designers take care of it for me
  • :-)

In reality, I’ll do a lot more customizing and make my theme unique, but that’s after I learn more about WordPress. So for now, please bear with the “generic” look of the site.
Unfortunately with WordPress, it’s a pain in the ass to maintain two separate journals (I’d sooner stab myself in the face than use the word “blog”) so the News and Journal sections are integrated into one, with “News” and “Journal” categories. For now the front page shows News and Journal entries integrated together, but I’ll do a little more work into splitting it up to appear as two separate journals like the old page (by default, instead of showing all entries, only entries from the “News” section will be on the front page, etc).
Also, with the static pages, the ones that used to generate data dynamically from the database no longer do this. By default, WordPress doesn’t allow execution of code in its pages. I’ll need to write up custom templates for those pages to do database requests, but I need to learn how the template system in WordPress works first. So for now, it’s just a copy-and-paste “snapshot” of the way the pages last looked during conversion.