ee’s pretty robust and uses dynamic page creation, so you don’t have a rebuild each time you save something (i think MT moved away from that, but the last time i used it, i had to constantly rebuild things – which is why i got away from it). migrating was pretty easy. if someone like me can do it, it should be a breeze for you. my site isn’t nearly as huge as heather’s, but i had 3 or 4 years’ worth of almost daily entries.

if you want to take a look under the hood of EE, let me know. i wouldn’t mind letting you see how it works behind the scenes.

it’s way more powerful than how i’m using it right now, mostly because i don’t have the time during school to dig in & learn more about how i can customize it to do all the cool things it’s capable of.

We only considered free solutions. He settled on Drupal because it’s so customizable. There’s a large selection of plug-ins (thanks to the active Drupal community) and the few things I’ve wanted that haven’t been available he’s just written himself. That’s another reason we chose Drupal over some of the other solutions out there – complete access to and control over the code. It’s also easy to setup and use. Cost, customization, control: it was the obvious choice for our needs.

I would definitely consider building your own system. My site gets a tiny fraction of the traffic that your sites do, but it is only a couple hundred lines of PHP with a mysql db which makes it extremely fast.

Plus it’s wicked fun to write your own code and have complete confidence that you understand the problems when they happen. Once you start to write your own stuff all the packages like wordpress and textpattern just seem incredibly overcomplicated.

Plus you can do WHATEVER you want. It’s very empowering.

It’s hard to fit a premade CMS with what a client wants because every client wants something different. Personally, I struggle with this constantly because nothing I’ve ever downloaded has done what I’ve wanted it to do; and, in the end I end up building my own in PHP.

In Heather’s case, that would be thousands of nags. Not good. Movable Type with Typekey is a great solution for comment spam. The multiple blogs feature is sweet as well. There are sexy options out there, but at this point, I’m not sure it’s worth it, unless there is a compelling way a new solution handles content.

I like the Section/Category thing that Textpattern has going on, but it’s too rigid. Sure, plug-ins extend something but what happens when the plug-in developer stops supporting the plug-in? Or the product upgrade breaks the plug-in? You’re screwed. And that’s my issue. I don’t want to be screwed. Except by my lady.

The best feature of WordPress, IMO, is the Akismet anti-spam plug in. Maybe I’m a rare case, but I’ve never had a false positive or a false negative with Akismet, and it’s blocked thousands of spam comments at my site.

I’ve also considered switching to Typo because the Ajax is slick, and Rails is sexy. But I’m not sure if that’s really a compelling reason to use it.

In terms of blogging, one of the biggest problems facing site owners was comment spam. Six Apart fixed that one in a big way with Typekey. I know it’s a barrier for site visitors, but sometimes barriers are a good thing.

Not to mention that Textpatterns forms have limitless possibilities and the tag system is excellent as are the large amount of great plugins/add-ons. Has MT been good to you and how do you find managing it?