Movable Type vs. WordPress
Via PhotoMatt I found a very interesting comments thread on what is basically an argument of Movable Type vs. WordPres. Now everyone knows that I worship Movable Type, but I wish to voice some thoughts on this topic.
Movable Type and Wordpress are aimed at completely different audiences. If you upgraded to MT 3.0 you would have seen that the title was no longer "MOVABLE TYPE :: Personal Publishing System" but now was "Movable Type Publishing Platform." As can be seen from this post at Mena's Corner
One final thing. You'll notice that we're no longer describing Movable Type as a "Personal Publishing System" -- we now call it a "Publishing Platform." While "personal" remains a major component to weblogging, the medium continues to evolve and so must the tools. We feel that offering Movable Type as a platform will embrace the new uses of weblogs that we have yet to imagine.
WordPress on the other remains a personal publishing system.
So why does this make a difference ? Well since MT is no longer aimed at just the average weblogger that wants to talk about politics or his/her life, 6A haven't bothered including features like a Link Manager or even Typelistsfor that matter. In the context of MT, these things really don't need to be built into the app as they would just increase bloat. They are perfect for the plugins that 6A have decided to support and in fact extend and encourage - this can be seen by the loads of new hooks in MT 3 and mt-plugins.org becoming an official 6A website.
Now if you really want to compare the two no matter who its aimed at, personally at this stage (MT 3.01D vs. WP 1.2) I would say MT wins ! With this opinion, I am trying to view it without any bias but I am rating the apps as an average weblogger talking about whatever comes into his mind !
Why do I say this ? Well the first reason is because I have no experience with PHP tags whatsoever, and having a very through look at the WordPress tags, they completely confused me. For example, to have you entries listed (ie a loop) in MT you would call <MTEntries> see nice and simple, the user has absolutely no idea that MT is looping for the specified amount of entries ! In WP, you need to define the actual loop like so <?php if ($posts) : foreach ($posts as $post) : start_wp(); ?>. Now for a person not knowing the least bit of PHP which looks easier ?
WordPress though does have some remarkable features that would greatly benefit the personal weblogger (their target audience). These features include things like the Link Manager. If I was recommending a weblog app, I would actually recommend WordPress. The reason being is that it is quicker and easier to install than MT and for the average weblogger provides some very useful feautres.
Both are truly remarkable apps, in the end it is completely the end-user's decision on which he/she feels more comfortable using and enjoys the most. There is no real need (or use) to argue which is better ! I for one like both and have the pleasure of using both on a regular basis !
4 Comments
Subscribe to Movalog's Feed
Andrew Quinn said:
on Aug 2, 2004 11:24 PM | Reply
I wouldn't say that it's no longer aimed at Political or Personal weblogs ... it's just that they're trying to expand their user base a bit.
The majority of blogs will always be about Politics/Personal stuff, and 6A aren't turning away from those groups ... just looking elsewhere IN ADDITION to their tried and true userbases.
Anil Dash said:
on Aug 3, 2004 2:11 AM | Reply
I would expand on this just a bit by saying that most users who are trying to do a personal blog don't want to think about technology at all, they just want to sign up and have good tools for managing and running their blog, and that's why we created TypePad.
Tools like TypeLists or photo albums or moblogging should be one click away for non-technical users, whereas developers and professionals tend to be comfortable assembling pre-created scripts and templates, from what I've seen over the past few years.
Ryan Schultz said:
on Aug 7, 2004 7:07 AM | Reply
Agreed. I think a lot of people jumped from MT to WP prematurely during the pricing flap.
--Ryan.
everdict said:
on Feb 4, 2006 4:46 AM | Reply
What about MT specs? What about performance and static pages now? Wordpress do not have static pages feature, meaning that its slower when the traffic goes up, right? What else would you add to support MT from the performance point of view? Thanks, www.e-verdict.com Place to Speak the Truth