We have converted to Word Press

If you have taken a look at this blog, or the Minot Public Schools’ Blog before today, you should notice a change. We have made the conversion from pMachine to Word Press. All the old posts have been manually re-entered, so the dates may be different.

After struggling with pMachine and getting a price quote on the cost of Moveable Type, we narrowed our search down to Manilla and Word Press. Manilla looked good, came with good recommendations from people I talked to at NECC, is inexpensive for schools (aound $300 for unlimited blogs), but it does not run on a Linux server.

After reading reviews of Word Press, we decided to install it and see what we thought. It was the easiest install of any of the blog applications we looked at, easy to use, and since it is open source it has good support. The current version requires a seperate install for each blog, but that is supposed to change this fall.

The frustrating part of pMachine was that each seperate blog still logged into the same administrator page, and someone could post to any of the blogs. Wouldn’t work very well with students. We could not find any way to set up an RSS feed for any of the secondary blogs, just for the main administrators blog, which we were using for the Minot Public Schools’ Blog.