I have been an unconditional fan of my blogging engine Serendipity for as long as I have been a blogger myself. It’s been fun, reliable and very stable. The great advantage of Serendipity is that, while being PHP-based, it uses Smarty templating – a user-friendly approach that has made my skin design rather easy.

But times, they are changing. While still as good as it was, Serendipity isn’t used by so many people and the team of (very) dedicated developers is small, which makes for slow evolution and growth. The sad fact on the web is that to stay in the game, one usually has to go with the winner.

Such winner, when it comes to blogging, is undoubtedly WordPress. It is big, it is smart, its evolution cycle seems impressive, and there are a gazillion users out there building plugins, templates and tools for it.

Until now, I had not found an easy enough manner to transfer a Serendipity blog to WordPress. The database compatibility issues of the move were daunting. That’s all changed. My tipping point was the discovery of the Serendipity to WordPress Importer plugin. It seemed simple enough. So I finally decided to give WordPress a try.

I installed it on a test domain, played with it a bit, liked it (obviously) and then installed it on my main site. I ran the import plugin and after minor tweaking of my database, ta-da! I imported almost 900 entries and thousands of comments successfully in less than 10 minutes!

But the main obstacle remains. By now, after 6 years of blogging and 6 different templates of ever-growing complexity, I have tweaked and shaped my blog just the way I like it in Serendipity. If I am to switch over to WordPress, I’ll first have to be able to adjust the template to something close enough to its current state. That is going to be a bit more difficult since WordPress doesn’t support Smarty and I will have to work in pure PHP, a language I’m not that familiar with.

Oh well. This is an ongoing process. So far so good, I must say. The blog in WordPress looks rather decent. As soon as I have a beta version, I’ll post a link and would very much appreciate some user feedback in terms of functionality, looks, template, etc.

Stay tuned.