So. The last time I migrated the blog, I got about 1/2 the job done. I liked Nucleus CMS (which I used for Dad's blog), and got that set up, but I wanted tagging, rather than categories, and just never had time to get the plugins I could find that would do that working quite right.
But now, I have it! I (heavily!) refactored some plugins created by other people: i.e. I cut out just what I needed, and simplified from the "everything and the kitchen sink" to as bare bones as I could get. And it all works now. Shiny!
I really do like Nucleus as a blog engine thing: I've yet to find anything I couldn't make it do using plugins-- with every other bit of blog software I've played with, I've had to hack the source, which made upgrading a royal pain. I still haven't brought in a markup language like textile or markdown-- when I migrated from textpattern (which was migrated from MT), I just pulled the HTML version of the posts into the table. From a migration point of view, this makes sense, as the full HTML is the only thing that doesn't change (it's a pain to go back and edit, but how often to you edit really old posts? like never!). I'm confident that a plugin can do what it has to (maintain the textile/markdown in a different table than the entry), it's just a matter of getting to it.. *sigh*
