my conversion from Greymatter to Movable Type

6 January 2002

I started using Greymatter to publish Leather Egg on 1 January 2001. It’s a terrific program, and the purpose of this page is not to bash Greymatter but rather to explain why I converted this site to Movable Type and to share some of my experiences.

I first became aware of Movable Type in the fall of 2001 and I was intrigued. What piqued my curiosity most was the ability to maintain multiple blogs within the same application. I’ve long considered starting a separate sports-related blog, but with Greymatter this would have required a separate installation. I’ve also considered putting my photologue into a blog format rather than managing it manually. When I noticed Movable Type added support for importing Greymatter entries (complete with comments), I made the decision to convert the site to MT. I read the documentation for MT and found it to be comprehensive and very straightforward. The installation is remarkably similar to Greymatter. If you’ve installed Greymatter, you will have no trouble installing MT.

As the year 2002 approached, I realized my Greymatter installation would continue to write my archive files into the same folder as my 2001 entries. Movable Type allows the author to archive entries into different folders on your site (which I’m doing based on the year of the entry but which can also be done by categories, if you wish to assign customized category topics to your entries). So over the 2002 New Year’s holiday, when I typically sit around watching college football bowl games for hours on end, I decided to take the plunge and convert my site to MT.

Rather than trying to write a narrative of the site conversion, I’m just going to list some points with my thoughts and comments. If you have specific questions regarding any of this, please use the "feedback" link under the leather egg over there to left and I’ll try my best to answer you (keep in mind I’m not a programmer and not an expert … these are just my personal observations). Without further ado:

My web host offered subdomains, so I set up a test site at test.leatheregg.com and did all my work there. I also have root access, and MT uses a database directory to store your entries (more on that later), so I put the database directory at the root level (as recommended). This means the database directory is in a common location to both www.leatheregg.com and test.leatheregg.com. This allowed for a very easy transition when moving the MT site into production because I didn’t have to reinstall or rebuild the database.

I followed the instructions in the MT user’s manual for exporting my Greymatter entries. It worked exactly as advertised. I discovered, however, that my GM entries were exported in a chronological format with the most recent entries first, so when I imported them into MT, my entry numbers were reversed from the order they appeared in GM. I wanted to make sure any links to my archived entries from outside Leather Egg were not broken, so I opened the exported file and cut-and-paste all 270 entries to rearrange them in reverse order. Through a series of search-and-replaces, it took me about an hour to do this. After re-importing the entries into MT, the entry numbers in MT matched the entry numbers in GM. (There may be a way to export your GM entries in the reverse order and if I had to do it again, I would certainly explore that option before rearranging them manually.)

I also discovered MT names the archive files with a 6-digit number, whereas GM uses an 8-digit number. For instance, my archive entry in GM at /log/2001/00000174.shtml was now named /log/2001/000174.shtml. This again would break any links from outside this site, but since MT allows customization of filenaming, I simply added two zeros to the filename in my configuration:

The default monthly archive filenames in MT do not match those from GM, so I also customized the monthly archive filenaming configuration as such:

MT does not contain nearly as many customization options as GM. Personally, I had no problem with this. I always felt the number of customization options in GM was a bit overwhelming (and I didn’t use most of them) and it was at times frustrating wading through the templates settings in GM to find what I was looking for. In MT, I was able to recreate the exact same look and feel of my site with 4 simple templates (I added a 5th template for comments previewing after I re-launched).

Rebuilds in MT seem to be much faster than in GM. While tweaking my templates, I performed quite a few rebuilds of the entire site. I didn’t time any of the rebuilds for comparison so this is just a casual observation, but the rebuild time in MT seemed to take about half the time it took in GM. I mentioned earlier that MT uses an entry database. All your entries and comments are stored in a central area. Greymatter stored the raw entries as individual CGI files in your entry archives. I assume the faster rebuilds probably has a lot to do with this different architecture in MT.

Faster performance means MT can do things like update all the affected files when a comment is entered. In GM, comments to entries are not updated in your archive files until you add a new entry. In MT, every time a comment is added, your individual archive files — and your monthly (or weekly, or categorically) archived files are updated automatically.

Finally, Movable Type is a new program, built from the ground up by a team that includes a professional Perl programmer. This is not to take anything away from Noah Grey, who built a terrific journaling platform as a hobby. But Noah has also indicated he has no plans to personally continue development on GM (although he has opened the sourcecode for others to work with). I envision my site continuing to grow and evolve, and I think MT provides a better long-term solution for me.

This is not a comprehensive comparison of the two programs … it’s only my personal experience. Greymatter offers a lot of options not available in Movable Type: karma voting for entries, censoring and IP address blocking, built-in search capabilities, etc. Movable Type also offers features not available in Greymatter: categorization of entries, multiple blogs, e-mail notification lists, etc. Both of these content management systems have their strengths, and it’s wonderful to have choices.