Well it took me a while to move CMS platforms but the reasons I moved mainly had to do with Movable Type having so few development plugins\extensions and their almost total abandonment of the Open source version. I was a few years late moving from Movable Type to WordPress and there were several reasons including time and life’s normal flows.
One reason it took me so long to migrate off of Movable Type is that Movable Type was very flexible so any plugins or widgets as they call them in Movable Type you can create easily by embedding that code into custom widgets.
The main reason it took me so long to go to a new CMS is that Movable Type Pro has in it’s core a method for easily creating sub-domains and sites that other CMS’ didn’t have off of one code base and database. WordPress has had multi-sites for several years but it didn’t seem to be a core function and seemed to require additional plugins to use how I wanted to use it.
Movable Type is also very portable so moving from site to site even with simple names is very intuitive and easy. Worpress even in its recent development cycle it takes some tedious work and there is no native built in function as there is in Movable type. Movable Type makes it easy to use root relative paths while WordPress hard codes domains into the database. Unfortunately Movable Type could not parlay their strengths and involve more of the development community and still seem to be far behind other CMS in involving developers.
Another reason it took so long for me to switch CMS’ is I was also experimenting with other CMS’ like Drupal, Joomla, Plone and a few others. Easily having sub-domains off of one code and database was the reason I didn’t go with Drupal. The reason I didn’t go with Joomla was I was not comfortable with the blogging within Joomla it seemed adding content/posts was not a cohesive process and I didn’t want to be tied into any of the leading blogging extensions offered as a Joomla extension.
I wish WordPress was more portable is my biggest gripe. I tend to get my sites working on a local virtual system on my LAN and then just clone and forward the appropriate ports to the outside world. With WordPress I need to get into the database and get this done through searches or a script that has been supplied @ https://interconnectit.com/products/search-and-replace-for-wordpress-databases/. There is sufficient documentation on moving sites (http://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress) even for multi-site but I wish it wasn’t so tedious. I will also watch my naming conventions on my systems going forward as well so that in the future I will be able to use the script much more easily to change unique names without having to go through the scripts output to exclude items if I use common system names.
Wordpress has a wide range of themes, tons of plugins, a very active community, multi-site seems more part of the core now, and is more flexible than I thought. I can have sub-domains off of one code and database in WordPress making administration easier. Adding content, posts, pages, managing comments, putting custom code into widgets and plugins etc is very straightforward in WordPress which is what I was after so overall so far very happy with my WordPress move.
