Movable Type vs. WordPress

Businesslogs weighs in with a detailed comparison between MT and WordPress, giving the nod to WordPress.

It seems to me that unless Six Apart really gets its act together and revitalizes the entire Movable Type application, codebase, and community, new bloggers will no longer use MT but will use WordPress instead, a change that's already happening. WP's active development and range of free blog themes to choose from are extremely inviting to new bloggers.

Six Apart could be in danger of what happened to Radio UserLand – a once cutting edge blogging platform got long in the teeth and users migrated elsewhere. I know I did. My political blog, Politics in the Zeros, started out as a Radio blog. But there were odd bugs, and declining amounts of tech support, plus other platforms had more features. (BTW, the conversion from Radio to WordPress, once I figured out how, was quick and easy.)

I have this blog, Polizeros is WordPress.org, and Downtown Tomatoes, a gardening blog with my wife, is Movable Type. So, I'm using many platforms.

Tweaking templates. Businesslogs thought WP templates were harder to tweak than MT. Me, I think they're both a pain to do! Plus, both require serious programming knowledge. So jump in, get a book on it, and start bashing away. That's how most programmers learn anyway.

Rebuilding constantly in MT is annoying, and while I'm sure someone has an MT plugin for a WYSIWYG editor, WordPress already has one built in.

They also thought that installing MT might be more complicated than WordPress. I took the easy way out and used ISPs each vendor recommended, and they do the install for me, often with one-click upgrades. Works for me.

Finally though, it's the user community. The WordPress community is thriving, and there's many plugins and themes, more so than MT.

So, I give the nod to WordPress too.