…that I’m going to need to migrate the site from Movable Type to WordPress. My MT installation is so old (and so desperately in need of upgrading) and so highly customized that moving it will be a hassle so large and complicated it makes me cry to think about it. Yet upgrading is the only way I’m going to be able to try some of the last-ditch things I need to try to get this site on a paying basis.
Oh my god, this is making a pit of despair form in my stomach…
Sending an utterly useless virtual hug in your direction. Just from my own tentative experience in maintaining a very early text-heavy website for a student org back in the 90’s, I can only begin to imagine what you are contemplating.
Best of luck. Wish I could help.
Are you sure it’s not another great disturbance in the Force?
What are the things you want to try to make the site pay?
For one, with WordPress, I could use TinyPass, which would make it very easy to limit some content to subscribers and give them a seamless experience. The things that I’ve come up with lately — like giving only subscribers an add-to-Netflix link — are too unwieldy to be truly useful.
I’m running a *very* old version of MT, and my host has been bugging me to years to upgrade. Unfortunately, because of how customized the site is, upgrading to the latest version of MT would be at least as big a pain in the ass as moving to WP, and WP seems to have won out as far as plugins and options and so on. So if i’m gonna go through this, I might as well move to WP.
What do *you* think I could be doing?
I don’t know that I understand the business model you have in mind. I would think that the most valuable products to your readers that you produce are the actual reviews. I’m not sure why having subscriber only access to material of secondary interest (and probably only of interest to a limited subset of readers) is viewed as a carrot for enticing more subscribers. It seems like limited access to at least some of the reviews is the more straightforward route. Though admittedly I’ve never tried what you are attempting…
Who said anything about having subscribers only access to material of secondary interest?
Yes, one of the things I could do with TinyPass is limit new reviews to subscribers for a short time, for instance. Among many other options.
You can already do that by sending out new reviews as a newsletter and adding them to the site at a later date.
That’s a lot more complicated than it needs to be. It wouldn’t let subscribers comment, for one. It would mean I couldn’t post links on Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB, and all the other sites, for another. It wouldn’t let nonsubscribers see what they’re missing.
Email is not an optimal solution.
Sure, it’s not optimal, but a placeholder page with the summary would address most of these shortcoming (especially subscriber comments). Sure, it’s not optimal, but at least it gives you an opportunity to see if a particular strategy has the potential to put you in the black before investing heavily in site migration.
I think you’re missing the overall point: the site desperately needs to be updated. I had a reminder of this recently when a plugin that is essential to the site malfunctioned. It’s no longer being supported by the author because it’s so old. Fortunately, the tech guys at my Web host went way beyond the call of duty to fix it for me. But that’s not something I can count on forever.
Also, because I cannot properly integrate all the subscription stuff here, subscribers are getting lost in the shuffle, not aware that they’re entitled to stuff by email. Somehow, they’re missing the email signup and other subscriber-only stuff.
To be honest, I’m not hopeful overall. I’ve tried lots of strategies to get significant numbers of readers to subscribe, and nothing has worked.
Thanks for the explanation. I should know better than to meddle with business that I don’t really understand. Hopefully something you try works out!
Thanks.
Knowing the kind of file transfers my husband has programmed, I thought that there must be a market for an automated blog migration tool. I found one here: https://tp2wp.com/ . I can’t speak for it’s product quality, but just thought it would be worth knowing this is out there, and probably more like it. Best of luck to you.
My site is too highly customized for any sort of automated move. But, purely coincidentally that company is actually going to help me with getting my database ready for WordPress.