Written on June 21st, 2005 at 05:06 pm by duncan

WordPress vs Movable Type

Its a matter of history that I was a member of the Movable Type diaspora when the house that Mena built decided for better or worse to alienate a large number of their loyal user base with MT 3. Its been 12 months, and a lot of the old MT gang are writing WordPress plugins and helping out whilst Six Apart continues to chase the corporate dollar whilst protesting that it’s really a good corporate citizen at heart (eg: we support Open Source because we bought Live Journal).

But enough of my purposeful provocation in a blatant attempt to drive up poor Darren’s stats here whilst he is in Europe. Seriously, 12 months later, what’s better: WP or MT? Both have moved forward in terms of development. I’ll start the ball rolling, I prefer WP, and there is one gigantically large reason why: ITS FREE and no matter what happens the source code will be free for me to tweak and customise for ever more…and naturally it works a treat as well, quicker in my experience than Movable Bloat, sorry Type, and I reckon Matt’s a much nicer person than Mena as well :-)

You might use another piece of blogware that you’d prefer, and there is some great development happening there (Nucleus, Serendipity to name but a few) so if its something else for you let us know. Please though, share your thoughts on blogware (self installed scripts if you like) not hosted blogs.

Fire away!!!

What next?

95 Responses to “WordPress vs Movable Type”

Tim Yang

June 21st, 2005 7:42 pm

How about this for a reason not to use MT: World’s worst installation process.
Tom

June 21st, 2005 8:02 pm

Indeed, I’m not a stupid person but I couldnt actually install MT it seemed far too complicated. I installed WordPress in about 5minutes, that includes downloading the whole package.
Andy Beeching

June 21st, 2005 8:18 pm

It’s all about Textpattern. Simple, powerful, and well over 200 plugins now…In my opinion a lot easier to write templates for as well.
nortypig

June 21st, 2005 8:31 pm

My votes for WordPress too :)
duncan

June 21st, 2005 9:16 pm

got to say I’ve always found WP super easy to install too
Deb

June 21st, 2005 9:18 pm

It’s WP all the way. I wasn’t impressed with MT’s licensing nor the requirement to “rebuild pages.” WP is lightweight, yet powerful. It’s easy to install and since 1.5 a dream blog app with drop-in plugins and themes/templates. WP also has a very Active community (not sure if MT does — don’t really care). :-)
Shai Coggins

June 21st, 2005 9:27 pm

For me, it’s a matter of what you need it for. Different blogging systems offer various features that can be used and tweaked accordingly. I use several blogging systems because of my work at http://weblogs.about.com/ (I need to be in the loop with as many blogging software as possible to know what I’m talking about.).

At the moment, I’m using Blogger.com for my podcast, Expression Engine for my personal blog, Movable Type for my private blog, WordPress for a writing blog, pMachine Pro for a creativity blog and my video blog, and Nucleus for AboutWeblogs.com (blogging network). And, I’ve got several blogging accounts on various services such as Xanga, ModBlog, LiveJournal, Multiply, MSN, Yahoo 360, etc. And, I’ve used and worked with Drupal, Mambo, etc.

Long story short: my top picks for free blogging software can be found here - http://weblogs.about.com/od/weblogsoftwareandhosts/a/topfreeblogs.htm
I have yet to edit and reformat this page to reflect some of my latest finds.
Shai Coggins

June 21st, 2005 9:38 pm

Duncan: I think I’m a glutton for punishment. ;-)

Seriously, I don’t really update all my blog accounts religiously apart from my “usual blogs” (8-10 blogs). But, it helps to have them so I know what I’m talking about when I write about various blogging systems. Problem is: There are just so many - it’s difficult to keep up! :-D
Shai Coggins

June 21st, 2005 9:40 pm

Oops. I didn’t realise Duncan just sent his reply via email (it arrived when I just finished posting) - so now I look like I’m talking to myself. Yikes.
Conánn

June 21st, 2005 9:47 pm

I started with blogger and within a week had moved to MT because I wanted more control, but within a month I was getting 100s of spam comments and could not keep up with it. Wordpress is fantastic, I have built a few blogs in it and have found it to be by far the simplest to setup with so many themes available. TextPattern is really nice to use but does not have as large a community to fall back on for questions.
I ended up with Drupal which had everything I needed. As an artist I wanted a blog which would let me post my images and sell them if I needed and Drupal has all these features and much more. Spam filtering, eccommerce, contact forms and blogging is all taken care of with modules and the forum + support is really good.
duncan

June 21st, 2005 9:48 pm

That’s alright Shai, I know what you are talking about, the email stated:
“I’m surprised you can keep up with all those blog accounts”
duncan

June 21st, 2005 9:49 pm

Conann
I like Drupal as well from the perspective of a CMS because it offers a lot more, but for my liking its not really blogware, although I do read a number of very good blogs written on it.
dannyFoo

June 21st, 2005 9:51 pm

I’ll be moving to WP for a couple of reasons I found that MT doesn’t suffice me anymore.
• More plugins
• Comment handling
• Less installation hassle
• FREE when you have more than 1 author!

Corporate greed just killed the ol MT that everyone used to love so much. I think the only ones benefiting most from it are those who know MT inside out. Cheers.
Conánn

June 21st, 2005 10:06 pm

True drupal is more CMS then blogware, there are a few stripped down installations but it will never have the nice one minute install that wordpress has to offer. titanicmemorial.com was up and running within 40 minutes using wordpress which is amazing to me.
Chris Abraham

June 21st, 2005 11:21 pm

I use MT and the reason why I stay is because I am afraid. I am afraid of trying to replicate the site I know and love to something new. I know that there are stickiness tools without compare, but I don’t care for now. I know that WordPress is a killer app, but I could not intuitively program the templates to my liking easily. Groan. Oh well, I think I will develop URBAN.NET as a WordPress site. See what happens.
nickel

June 21st, 2005 11:47 pm

I use WordPress for my personal finance blog and I like it a lot. I’ve used MT a bit, and it pales in comparison in terms of user-friendliness and usability.
–
fivecentnickel.com
Miha

June 21st, 2005 11:48 pm

I recently moved from MT to WP and after very short time of using WP I decided to never use MT again.
The main reason I moved is the template sistem in WP and more plugins I can chose for my sites.
Darcy

June 21st, 2005 11:51 pm

I’ve used WP, MT, Blogger, LiveJournal and at least a couple other blogging programs. WP has been the easiest to set up and to tweak and keep running. The site I’m banking on being a success the most, the one my name is linked to, is running on WP and I couldn’t be happier. There’s no doubt posting is faster, (no rebuilds) and the plugins are terrific and just as easy to install. There are MT plugins that sound great, but for the life of me, I can’t get them to work.
Changing Way » Blog Archive » WordPress, Competition, and Diasporae

June 21st, 2005 11:55 pm

[…]

WordPress, Competition, and Diasporae

Duncan guest-posts at enternetusers about WordPress vs Movable Type, proclaiming h […]
Jen Bekman

June 22nd, 2005 12:00 am

I have used MT, Blogger and WP. I have a very clunky install of Blogger on my gallery’s web site, and I’d like to migrate it to WP, but as Chris Abraham says above, I’m scared! When I was writing Unbeige for mediabistro, it was on MT and I found it to be achingly slooooow, unstable and not so flexible. Blogger is ok, but again, my install is clunky and unsophisticated.
I’ve been really pleased with WP so far. It was super easy to install. I’m not terribly technical by nature, but because I’ve worked in technology-related fields for a long time, I’m probably a bit more savvy than most. Still: I had it up and running in no time, and it’s zippy and has a lot of useful features integrated into it. One thing I’m not crazy about is the upload process for images - I use lots of photos in general. When I’m doing a very photo-heavy post, I have two browser windows open and have to toggle back and forth. That’s annoying. Another issue that I’ve been having is that my Syndication feeds seem to update sporadically at best, which is frustrating. But: it’s never once crashed on me once, I really like the dashboard interface and I’ve found the documentation to be pretty throrough (though somewhat hard to navigate.)
I need to migrate all my sites to another host, since Bob Parsons (the owner of godaddy.com) is the devil and I simply can’t justify giving him another cent of my money. I’m scared about doing that too! Hopefully I can do the blogger —> WP migration when I make that move.
Patrick Grote

June 22nd, 2005 12:33 am

I still use MT for the same reason Chris does. I have far too much invested in sites in terms of time and search engine positioning to switch.

My battles with MT haven’t been pretty. One of their upgrades broke my sites. lol

What I don’t like about both is the lack of ready to go styles and templates to choose from. Way too limited.

So what keeps me with MT? Intertia.
JimKukral

June 22nd, 2005 12:49 am

I’m considering switching as well. I want to know how it would effect my pages in the search engines? I mean, it would effectively change every page name right? Can you put some type of forward on your old MT pages or something? How is this handled?

www.revenews.com
Rich Miller

June 22nd, 2005 12:56 am

I’m a long-time MT user who got fed up with the 3.0 release and associated fees. I tested a bunch of open source blogging/CMS apps as I looked for an alternative, including WordPress, Drupal, Mambo, PHPNuke, PostNuke and Xaraya.

PHPNUke and PostNuke are simply not secure enough, and get hacked all the time. I think both Mambo and Drupal have great potential as CMSes, but have a fairly steep learning curve (especially Drupal). I just didn’t need that much power and that many features.

So I started working with WordPress. I’m impressed with the program, but it didn’t take me long to realize that relearning and duplicating my customizations and plugins would take a lot fo time. Which got me thinking: how much time am I spending trying to avoid paying for software? I pay for lots of software programs that are less useful than Movable Type.

Ttime is money for a self-employed blogger. So now I’m one of those wacky people who are paying Six Apart for an MT license. I’m sure WordPress is great (although that link-spamming episode kinda undermines its as the more ethical counterpart to Six Apart). And yes, the comment and trackback spam is an ongoing pain. But free isn’t everything.
David

June 22nd, 2005 2:01 am

I have been using WordPress since 0.72 and will continue to do so. I love how open and easy it is to change, and it only gets better.

I use it on a multitude of sites and have converted many of my friends over.

Great software… Whats Moveable Type? ; )
Jeff

June 22nd, 2005 2:53 am

I’m another long-time MT user who now uses WP…I was sceptical of WP at first but am now very happy with it…no need to rebuild pages is a big plus…easier to install and, of course, the cost was the first factor in making the choice…I suspect that MT will continue to have a solid customer base but am very glad that WP is an alternative.
Brian Breslin

June 22nd, 2005 2:58 am

Ok this is all good and well, but here is a major stumbling block with wordpress: its permalink urls. yeah yeah i know you are all going to say “but i can make custom permalink urls in wp” but not everyone can. I couldn’t and I’ve been doing this stuff for years. I was able to do it in MT in seconds. In WP this function is incompatible with Apache 1.3, you need apache 2.0. BUT apache 2.0 is incompatible with cpanel and a number of other control panel software for managing your server (crucial to ALOT of people, or at least me). So I’ll be sticking with my MT install for now until WP can fix that crucial issue (or someone can give me a REAL workaround for this that works). Permalinks are very important for search engines (and creating the subsites I need).
taugnee

June 22nd, 2005 3:05 am

Just FYI … For those of you feeling “stuck” with MT … MT does have an export feature so you can backup your archives and migrate to another platform. There are people out there that will, for a small fee, do this for you if the thought gives you shutters.

Two reasons why I no longer use Movable Type — 1) Spam 2) Licensing.

For the same price, you can get Expression Engine which is hands down the far superior, more flexible program. I’ve not yet used TextPattern but I’m itching to.

I think it’s been mentioned that one of the reasons that WordPress is so special is the fantabulous community of developers and designers out there writing plugin-ins and templates, etc. When choosing the most appropriate software for clients, I not only look at the features — I evaluate the price, how Active the community is, ease of use, and available spam solutions.

Drupal is a nifty tool, but it doesn’t have great solutions for spam. Unless I’ve missed something? Ok, perhaps I’m digressing too much … that might be another discussion altogether. (Hint: A good future topic might be “best spam solutions”) lol
JimKukral

June 22nd, 2005 3:49 am

Actually, if you have MT blacklist I find the spam problem 98% solved. If I switch to WP, it’ll be for the plugins and not having to worry about number of authors, etc…

I’m concerned now about the permalink urls. That would be a big stumbling block for me at www.revenews.com.

Jim
kazi

June 22nd, 2005 4:29 am

My site is running on WP too and I am really liking it. Even when the site crashed it took me about 20 minutes to reinstall and up and running. I have never used MT, but with little programming knowledge I was able to tweak my site to a standard design on WP platform. By the way donate WP!!! Loving it!!!
Kevin D. Hendricks

June 22nd, 2005 4:35 am

I’ve stuck with Movable Type and I enjoy it. Blacklist solves most of the spam problems. The only real issues I see are having to pay extra for more authors and having to pay something in general. But honestly, I don’t mind paying for software. If my one-time payment of $200 gives me quality software that does what I need it to, no problem. These people have to eat, too.

I also don’t see lots of plug-ins as a big bonus. I don’t want to go chase around every moonlighting techie’s fancy new plug-in and figure out which one I really need. I’d rather have the necessary features built-in and not have to worry about extras (granted Blacklist is an extra, but what can you do?). I’m just not as wild about open-source as everybody else seems to be. The openess and freedom comes across to me as disorganized and unstable (I’m not suggesting the software is unstable, just the whole process of lots of people with nothing invested in the software working on it).

But bottomline, it’s a hell of a lot better than using Notepad. When I started blogging in 1998 that’s what I did. (shudder)
David

June 22nd, 2005 5:38 am

Permalinks - No problem. It works just fine on my Cpanel Apache host. :P
I just made a file in windows called htaccess.txt which is empty. I upload it, chmod it, and then rename the file to.htaccess and it all works fine. I don’t understand where people are having problems with this. So don’t fret, and any problem you may have with Permalinks the support group would help or fix in a hurry. So whomever has long lasting problems with permalinks, is just not trying to fix them.

Plugins - They are a wonderful bonus. It allows you to extend WordPress in so many ways and for so many uses. You can push WP into a full CMS, or down to a newsreader for various feeds you like. Tell me that isn’t cool? : )
Johan

June 22nd, 2005 6:26 am

I am also using Wordpress as a CMS substitute for my site. The ‘pages’ function is an excellent CMS for small websites!
Unfortunately Wordpress is a bit slow, there are a lot of queries executed for simple actions but I hope that they solve this soon because there is quite a lot of discussion about this on the Wordpress forum.
This is something you see a lot with open source projects, the users are quite demanding when it comes to new features and the programmers prefer introducing new stuff over optimizing existing code.

I must admit that I haven’t migrated my old Blogger weblogs, mainly because of the.blogspot.com address and the fact that they are just very simple blogs that do not need any fancy stuff. This is the good thing about Blogger, it is nice and simple (no need to worry about upgrades, hosting, plugins etc.).
Allen

June 22nd, 2005 6:29 am

I am a relatively new blogger and I looked at WP first but did not like it’s backend, then I looked at MT and decided to go with it. Yes the installation and set up was a royal pain but I thought it was easier to use (go figure) and I was having fun playing with css and php, both of which I knew nothing about (still don’t).

Recently I installed WP on another site and I have found that either WP has made some improvements or I have become more comfortable with web based programs. So much so that I may have to switch.
David

June 22nd, 2005 6:30 am

For a faster front end there are changes you can make. There is http://lightpress.org/ as well as custom plugins people have made, but really I find WordPress to be much faster loading than some MT blogs I read.

Also, you don’t really need to worry about Upgrades, Hosting and Plugins for Wordpress either, as there are some free WordPress hosts that will do it all.
David

June 22nd, 2005 6:33 am

Allen - There are multiple skins for backends that can make your WP experience better.

The one I use is http://www.orderedlist.com/articles/wordpress-administration-design-tiger/

Which looks real nice in my opinion.
Phoenixrealm » Blog Archive » WordPress vs Movable Type

June 22nd, 2005 6:44 am

[…] s Movable Type
WordPress David June 21st, 2005

No Comments Yet

On enternetusers.net someone, Duncan from Blog Herald, decided it would be a g […]
Douglas Anders

June 22nd, 2005 6:57 am

I agree with Andy: Textpattern is fantastic. I’ve used Radio, MT and WP, Textpattern beats the first two hands down, and wins by nose with WP.
Brian

June 22nd, 2005 7:09 am

WP 1.5 gets my vote as the best blogging and all around CMS platform.

The MT perl scripts always managed to kill my server, but no such issues with WP. My only complaint with WP is that there’s no multiple blog support like MT…but WP is a snap to install and runs smoother than MT, and it’s FREE, so I can’t really complain too much. Plus the nonsense of “rebuilding” is a much welcomed thing of the past.
David

June 22nd, 2005 7:21 am

Brian - There is WordPress mU that is for multiblog and there is also a plugin which hacks wordpress to have muliple blogs… :)
Michael Moncur

June 22nd, 2005 8:01 am

I really like WordPress, especially version 1.5. The main reason is that it’s very extensible and hackable. I rely on a few plug-ins per site, including several I have written myself.

I used to write my own blog software but Wordpress made it easy for me to use something packaged while still writing a bit of PHP here and there to make my sites work the way I prefer.
Michael Moncur

June 22nd, 2005 8:02 am

P. S. I’m sure Darren will be surprised to see all of his comments filling up his email box. You should do a “mac vs. PC” post next. :)
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June 22nd, 2005 8:30 am

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duncan

June 22nd, 2005 10:16 am

Just on those people afraid of changing I can only talk from experience and thats been positive: after changing the Search Engines reindexed the site within 2 weeks, it may be advanced for some but I set up redirects from the old MT pages to WP and didn’t have too many problems, and I found out how to do it from the WP support forums (Im no genius in that regard, but the instructions are fairly easy). I hesitated for months before I changed mainly because I’d customised my templates heavily and was secure in what I had but looking back I wish I’d done the move earlier: you’ll find particularly now with WP1.5 an easier to use system with a great template system thats easier to customise, 1st rate spam protection and options (I always found MT Blacklist a pain) and a system that’s super quick with NO reloads, and I’ve got to say for me WP made blogging enjoyable again:
Remember this: you shouldn’t have to battle with your blogware every time you use it: I use to with MT and it was a constant drain, I never do with WP. To be a good blogger you should primarily be focused on writing, not the system you using.
Tommy

June 22nd, 2005 10:39 am

That’s interesting to hear all of the complaints about MT. I’ve used MT since the early 2.x versions and still use it to this day. I guess I don’t really want to move to another system (although from reading the comments, Drupal sounds interesting from and ecommerce standpoint). because I’m pretty heavily invested in MT. I have integrated gallery templates and have tons of template modules that keep it easy to manage. I also use MT as a deployment system for redesigning my site by having it always build “in-development” version of my templates and CSS files along side the real version so I can always tweak then release and do a rebuild. As you can see I have everything the way I like it (I guess I don’t know how green the grass is on the other side of the fence because I’ve yet to peer over).

While I’ll probably experiment with Drupal, WP, and Textpattern if I ever have time, I don’t see a need to move since MT serves my needs and just keeps humming (albeit slowly when I need to rebuild the entire site) along.
Jonathan

June 22nd, 2005 12:38 pm

My vote also goes to Wordpress, but not just Wordpress 1.5, to Wordpress 1.6! They have been working so hard on releasing a new version of Wordpress. Wordpress has so many better features than MT has. The ease to install, the ease to add plugins, the ease to change the design, everything revolving around Wordpress is awesome. I have seen many sites use Wordpress simply as a CMS tool instead of specifically a blog because it’s core nature.

Wordpress has many good features about it and the community for it continues to grow as well. Many sponsored contests such as the Plugin Contest and the Design Contest, the community continues to grow as well as the support for Wordpress itself. It’s amazing to see what it has turned into.
Kickass

June 22nd, 2005 12:48 pm

Brian Breslin, you’re wrong. I’m on Apache 1.3.33 and I use search engine friendly permalinks with WP with no problem. I did have a bit of a challenge setting it up, but the WP community is absolutely tops in my book, and had me up and running with it within a day.

I also found WP Themes easy to customize, the codex support thorough, and the interface intuitive. Plugins are readily available and most work wonderfully.

As far as other ways to blog, I’ve used blogger in the past and find that WP has cut my post time considerably compared to blogger. Oh, and blogger support is, for the most part, nonexistent (Custom template? We don’t offer support for that!) while WP has been great. MT I haven’t tried, but why would I need to?
duncan

June 22nd, 2005 1:26 pm

Re: the issues with search friendly URL’s I’d argue that its more of a hosting problem than a WP problem, I can remember an issue with MT a few years back because my host didn’t have Imagemakic installed, if you’re looking at the hosting side though most decent hosts will tell you up front what they support now (and if they don’t know you’ve got to worry) and I’ve been with 3 different hosts for various projects in the last six months with WP and never had a problem, although I must admit I do miss the WP1.2 ability to actually manually edit.htaccess within WP, but thats just me.
Graeme Pietersz

June 22nd, 2005 2:27 pm

Several people seem worried about the Wordpress Permalink problems. There is a very simple solution. Boren’s reduced rewrite rules.

Forget the complex rewrite rules WP generates and put this in your.htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ /index.php/$1

There is a plugin to make WP do this here: http://boren.nu/archives/2005/03/07/reduced-rewrite-plugin/

Personally, given how easy it is do to manually, I did not bother with the plugin.
Tom Hanna

June 22nd, 2005 2:46 pm

Search friendly permalinks are a nonissue at best and counterproductive at worst. The standard URLS get the same page rank as your main page. “Search friendly” permalinks on a couple of sites I visited with PR of 5 or 6 for the main page had PR of unranked or zero. Add to that the fact that the standard URL is still out there and you have a potential duplicate content issue. The search engines don’t have any problem reading the standard URLs. Go type “Politics GOP” into your favorite search engine and see what WordPress blog using standard permalinks and no advertising budget shows up in the top 5.
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How To Blog For Fun & Profit!

June 22nd, 2005 11:36 pm

WordPress Trumps MovableType

According to the Blog Herald and based on an unscientific poll conducted over at enternetusers.net, WordPress seems to be the most preferred blog system when compared to MovableType. Technorati Tags : blog+software, WordPress, MovableType
Usayd

June 23rd, 2005 2:15 am

Wordpress is much much more customisable you can practically reprogram the whole system yourself if you wished. It is extremely easy to install and it works on a vary basic server spec. I prefer it largely over Movable type which I have tested in the past. Also the WP community is far greater in both number and knowledge then that of MT
Teli

June 23rd, 2005 2:39 am

I’ll toss my vote in for WordPress.

Ease of install
Cost (free)
Speed (no rebuilding of pages to slow you down)
Templates/Customization (with the new templating feature, customizing it is a snap)
Flexibility - there are a number of plugins to help WordPress go above and beyond the call of duty.
Writing your own plugins is a snap

The one (and only) time I tried installing MT for my personal site, it sat dormant for about 2 weeks while I tried to figure out its templating system, I decided to scrap it for WP and had the site installed and customized in under 3 hours.

While I’ve finally gotten used to MT, I would not use it for anything other than testing/practice for my hard core MT clients (luckily I’ve converted all of them to WP :) )
Bloggerpreneur

June 23rd, 2005 4:42 am

I will toss in my vote for Wordpress, as I have just recently moved my blog from Blogger to Wordpress. Before I made the move, I evaluated MT and Wordpress head to head against each other. I planned to go over each feature one by one to give a fair comparison but in all honesty it only took three reasons to make me choose WordPress over Movable Type.

3. Cost… WordPress is Free, Movable Type, although not that expensive, cost infinitely more than free.
2. Plugins and Themes… The way you can just drop plugins and themes into Wordpress 1.5 is unmatched.
1. Ease of Installation… It only took me 5 or 10 minutes to get Wordpress installed but took at least 5 or 6 hours over 2 or 3 days and 2 calls to my ISP’s technical support to get Movable Type working properly.
slamp

June 23rd, 2005 5:40 am

I prefer WP than MT but I moved to b2evolution in final.
markku

June 24th, 2005 3:06 am

Wordpress’s installation alone is enough reason to love it. And certainly the opposite holds true for MT.
Blog Party

June 24th, 2005 2:39 pm

Wordpress has saved my life :)
John Bradbury

June 24th, 2005 6:15 pm

I love WordPress but the recent issues I’m having with trackback are causing a really big problem.

I’m not really getting any useful advice off the support forum and therein lies the weakness of using free software.
Adam Simon

June 25th, 2005 2:35 am

One thing that people often overlook in the whole MT going for-pay and corporate is the benefits you get from having an 80-person company back a product you’re using - like tech support. John Bradbury notes (in #60) that he can’t get the support he needs from the WP community, but when my org’s site, built in MT, started acting crazy, I just had to open a support ticket, and within 24 hours I had Six Apart techs in the trenches, examining my installation directly until they found the problem (it turned out to be a combination of a MT bug and some server settings, which I never would have found myself). And this was for a $0 license for a non-profit org’s site - I’ve never paid SA a dime, and they still had three people working on my case. The level of support was impressive, and convinced me to stay with MT. It’s not perfect, but at least there are people who’s livlihood depends on making it work, which can be a real salvation when things go awry.
Michael

June 26th, 2005 2:38 am

You should ask your question next week again, when Sixapart will announce the next version of Movable Type. Will they deliver what they promised?

Read here what MT Product Manager Jay Allen says in the MT Forums:

“Since MT 3.16 (which was a massive bug fix release in case you missed it), the Movable Type team has been working extremely hard behind the scenes on the next version. It’s absolutely beautiful and the most powerful and satisfying-to-use version of Movable Type to date. All of us at Six Apart are literally going nuts waiting for the moment when we can actually safely use it for our own sites and intranet blogs. I’m sure that you will find it equally compelling.
You’ll be hearing a lot more about this very soon. I apologize for the wait, but it’s a major release and there were a lot of i’s to dot and t’s to cross before we could call it a finished product.
(…)
The next version (and probably the next and next and so on) would be a free upgrade for you. You’ll start hearing more about this next week.”

Links:
http://www.movabletype.org/support/index.php?act=ST&f=12&t=52749&s=3418ee61f22b771569053dfd15136dc6
http://www.jayallen.org/journey/2005/06/the_best_friday_in_a_long_time
James

June 26th, 2005 3:43 am

Right now, all the comments on this page say:

Warning: preg_replace(): Unknown modifier ‘/’ in /home/virtual/site103/fst/var/www/html/wp-content/plugins/google-hilite.php on line 107

Warning: preg_replace(): Unknown modifier ‘a’ in /home/virtual/site103/fst/var/www/html/wp-content/plugins/google-hilite.php on line 105

So maybe that’s a point for MT.
Setti

June 27th, 2005 5:50 am

WoW! 64 comments! Cool!
duncan

June 27th, 2005 1:47 pm

A new version of MT, wonder how much this one will cost? Will it put some more knives into the little people? oh, and Michael, thanks for the links: I love this quote:

“For example, Trackback moderations was suggested 2 years ago, and a more user-friendly system of assigning multiple categories to a post was suggested in January 2005.I’m pretty frustrated that I actually bought a few MT licences, because simple issues such as fighting spam and basic user-friendliness seem abandoned by SixAprt. ”

Good money after bad I say :-)
Darren Rowse

June 27th, 2005 6:07 pm

I’m a WP guy although still run 5 of my blogs on MT. I’m hoping to move them though to WP when I get home.

Great discussion
Mikey

June 28th, 2005 8:17 am

I prefer the more custom solution. I use blur6ex and while still growing in features is a simple solution that offers what I need.
JalanSutera.com

June 28th, 2005 1:46 pm

Mengapa WP?

Kemarin, ketika saya menulis Kecanduan WordPress, ada orang yang mengirimkan email lewat halaman Kontak menanyakan mengapa saya memilih WP. Katanya, bukankah fantastico dari CPanel juga menyediakan banyak blog dan CMS yang lain? Wah, karena saya belu…
Easy Bake Weblogs » WordPress versus Movable Type

July 1st, 2005 2:42 am

[…] ls.com/”>

Andy Wibbels

Duncan takes time to wonder about the growth of WordPress in the wake of Movable Type’s licensing restructurin […]
Michele

July 2nd, 2005 8:17 am

I would have to agree. MT was “nice”, but I have never regretted moving over to Wordpress. I found MT’s handling of templates and plugins awkward and our clients were constantly having issues with obscure Perl modules that the plugin writers neglected to mention as prerequisites. A little over 12 months later and we have many happy WP users on our network and very few support requests from them :)
As for me, well I love my blog and keep tweaking it - even if I sometimes break it in the process.
Six Apart may be making money from “a” market, but I think they have lost as much, if not more, than what they have gained.
Just my two cents.
Adam Messinger

July 18th, 2005 1:02 pm

I don’t understand the level of animosity against Six Apart that’s showing here. Movable Type was never open-source software, and it never claimed to be. Just because it was written in Perl so that you could read the source doesn’t mean anyone should’ve expected it to be free forever. 6A is a corporation, and corporations exist to make money.

They screwed up the original licensing plan, big time, but they also had the good grace to admit the screw-up and handle it openly using input from the community. The new pricing structure is much more reasonable, and has a free option well suited to most personal weblogs. That said, I still prefer ExpressionEngine’s $199 flat-rate, unlimited-use commercial license. MT’s tiered pricing based on number of users is restrictive and expensive by comparison. Hopefully 6A will realize this and cut prices to keep their product competitive.

I jumped ship from MT when the original, ludicrous, licensing plan was announced. I was running three MT blogs to produce two front-facing web sites (old MT users will know what I mean), and didn’t qualify for the original free personal license. WP impressed me, and I’ve stuck with it for my main personal weblog. Version 1.5 now does everything I could want, and when combined with some amazing plugins does even more than the current release of MT (3.17).

I’ve stuck with MT for my photoblog, however. As someone else mentioned above, the WP photo upload interface is seriously lacking. Basically, it comes down to using what best meets your needs. Even MT is free to try out, so the best strategy is to investigate both and choose the one that suits you.
Adam Messinger

July 18th, 2005 1:52 pm

Totally different topic, so I’ve started a new comment. I’d like to address some of the worries of MT users who are considering moving to a new platform.

One thing that’s come up a couple of times is permalinks. First it should be said that permalinks are highly configurable in WordPress, and you may be able to mimic your old URL structure on that platform. Here’s the documentation for that: http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

There are some cases where that won’t work, but you still have options. For bloggers hosted on an Apache server, the best route is to create a custom MT template that will automatically create URL-rewriting rules for your.htaccess file. I did this, and it’s incredibly slick how well it works. Instructions: www.quietconfusion.com/2003/03/movable_type_file_rewrite/

If you’re hosted on Microsoft IIS or some other non-Apache server software, you can still re-direct search engines and visitors. The best way, in my opinion, is with PHP redirects. These will transparently transition your users from the old page to the new one, and will also send a message to search engine spiders telling them that the Blog Surf Skate Snow Moto Clothing Shirt Shoes Clothes Enternetusers.net to the new location. First, change your archive paths to match what WP (or your other new platform) will use as closely as possible and rebuild. Create an MT template that contains the necessary PHP code, but with a template tag in there to give the correct location of the new URLs. Set up the archive path for this new template to be the same as the old archive paths, so that visitors will land on the old pages and be re-directed. Rebuild again, and you’re done. Find the PHP code you need here: www.mallasch.com/web/story.php?sid=49

As a last resort, if you have neither Apache nor PHP (get a new host!), you could use HTTP re-directs. These work a lot like PHP redirects, but without the PHP. Instead, the archive template you create will be for an HTML file with a special meta tag in the head. Find out more here: www.codepoetry.net/archives/2003/08/05/changing_archive_links.php

Okay, now that we’ve covered re-directing permalinks let’s hit spam. I’ve seen some fans of MT-Blacklist here, and I agree that’s an excellent spam-blocker. WordPress has something even better, though — Spam Karma ( www.unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/ ). This thing is absolutely amazing. Word has it that some of the best features of MT’s SpamLookup (used and praised by Blacklist’s creator) were inspired by an early beta of Spam Karma 2.0.

If you’re considering non-WP CMSs, your anti-spam options do dwindle a little bit. Mambo has no substantial spam blocking solution to speak of, though I suspect that may change after the release of version 5.0 next year. ExpressionEngine’s spam protection is disappointing, consisting mainly of per-site black/whitelists, CAPTCHA, and throttling (see http://eedocs.pmachine.com/general/spam_protection.html ). Drupal is the stand out here, with an optional spam module that sports flexible Bayesian filtering (a learning filter, like many e-mail spam blockers). For more on Drupal’s spam module, see www.drupal.org/project/spam

Hope that was helpful. Good luck to all the switchers out there! :-)
Michael Henshaw

July 21st, 2005 2:20 am

I had used MT 2.3 for a year and loved how it worked. I finally reached the crossroads where I had to decide to fork over the $70 to MT or try WP. I spent a weekend with WP and it finally came down to a decision… Do I relearn everything that took a year to learn on MT or do I pay to have a system I already know that is fully supported.

I decided to get MT 3.17…. I would also note that the update coming out (3.2) is free for those that have purchased a MT license. I love MT mostly because I am used to it. There are plenty of plug-ins available for it and my site looks great. I couldn’t be happier.
Jesse Gardner

September 21st, 2005 1:37 am

Lots of interesting comments here, but I will say that while MT does have a bit of a learning curve, it’s possibilities are virtually limitless. Complaints about rebuilding? MT now supports dynamic publishing. Complaints about plugins? Please! Visit Movable Type’s plugin page[1] for an eye opener. Complaints about installation difficulties? Movable Type 3.2 is extremely simple… I upgraded to the newest version in the time it took to FTP the files and run mt.cgi.

And the brand new StyleCatcher plugin allows a one-button implementation of a host of different styles for your entire site. Not only that, but MT lets you do a whole lot more than just blogs. I’ve just finished two immense, non-blogs[2] that are completely powered by MT.

Definitely the way to go.

[1] http://www.sixapart.com/pronet/plugins/
[2] http://www.compvisions.com, http://www.plasticmind.com
Jesse Gardner

September 21st, 2005 1:38 am

Also… for those complaining about spam. MT 3.2 is shipped with SpamLookup… my spam count for the last 3 months? 0 Spam comments, 3 Spam trackbacks that weren’t published and flagged for moderation.
jalansutera

September 29th, 2005 12:09 pm

As a newbie in blogosphere, I choose WP. I used to have PMachine. But WP rocks!
test

October 2nd, 2005 11:26 pm

http://www.test.com12345
http://www.test.com12345 delete this comment
kit

October 5th, 2005 1:47 pm

I’ve used MT and WP, and prefer MT for two reasons.

1) Static pages! I realise that a lot of people here think serving a dynamic page for every pageview is a good idea, but this creates an unnecessary amount of database traffic. The ‘rebuilding’ nonsense of MT is actually very advantageous. I’m aware of WP-cache, but it does appear to be a bit flaky at times. If you have a low traffic blog, this probably isn’t an issue for you.

2) multiple blogs managed from 1 location.

That being said, I’ve recently set up a new WP blog for a new NPO, which isn’t likely to receive a lot of traffic.. and in this case it’s probably the best solution.

I have also never had any trouble installing, or upgrading MT. MT upgrades tend to be just dropins.. not difficult :)
Wordpress or Movable Type » Successful Blog

October 8th, 2005 1:34 pm

[…] Discussion: Wordpress vs. Movabletype […]
jack.ukleja.com » Blog Archive » Hello world!

October 9th, 2005 9:22 pm

[…] You may notice I’ve just changed my blog software over to WordPress! The old blog is still there but has been renamed to jack.ukleja.com/blog2. I’m planning on remapping the old urls so the links on google etc dont break. The old blog used to run on pMachine Free but I was never was very fond for various reasons (including it being very suseptable to comment spam). So I’m giving WordPress ago and so far it seems pretty cool. Appears to have a very Active and skilled community behind it, lots of plugins etc. The interface is very clean and elegant and has tons of features including a Gallery2 integration. Some interesting discussion here about the merits of the various blogging tools if your interested in whats available. How exciting having a new toy! […]
nir

November 3rd, 2005 4:14 pm

testing
Erin Dailey

January 9th, surf zone.11:02 am

I just stumbled upon your site while searching for comparisons between MT and WP and I after spending an hour and a half trying to upload MT to my server and getting frustrated, I finally uploaded WP in five minutes and imported all my old files and damn, it rocks. I can’t believe how awesome it is.
C. Wess Daniels

March 10th, surf zone.2:29 am

without a doubt wordpress!
Lorelle on WordPress » WordPress versus Movable Type: Choosing a Winner?

March 11th, surf zone.10:40 pm

[…] Since June 2005, enternetusers’s WordPress vs Movable Type post has gotten over 80 responses and so far, it looks like WordPress is winning. This was followed in January surf zone.with an unscientific poll of enternetusers readers of which blog platforms users preferred. The results were interesting. The results had a few surprises for me. While I was expecting a large showing for WordPress (around 37% of the 1000 respondents) I was intruiged by the large number of enternetusers readers using the free hosted Blogger.com platform (22.2% - or 222 readers). This figure was almost triple the number of Movable Type Bloggers. Another surprise to me was the large numbers of Blog platforms that I’d never heard of before. By the end of the poll there were 49 options. Thirdly I was interested that 2% of those taking part use some sort of ‘custom made’ blog platform (sometimes even hand coded). […]
Will

April 5th, surf zone.12:19 pm

I use and love WordPress.

At first, I wanted to use MT. But I couldn’t figure out how to install it ;)
mama dearest

April 18th, surf zone.5:18 am

I have chosen the MT option to try it out and I couldn’t figure it out for the life of me! It didn’t let me have the option of modifying the page, like “Word Press” does. At least it’s “Dummy Proof!” I vote for Word Press.
OODLEDAY! » Interesting

August 6th, surf zone.6:25 am

[…] A discussion about MT vs. Wordpress at enternetusers […]
iconSam.com » Blog Archive » WordPress vs. Movable Type

August 11th, surf zone.2:30 pm

[…] WordPress vs. Movable Type […]
Lee Rogers

September 15th, surf zone.7:54 pm

Are you sure 26256 about this?!?
DavidCubed » Blog Archive » WordPress vs Movable Type

November 9th, surf zone.10:21 am

[…] On enternetusers.net someone, Duncan from Blog Herald, decided it would be a good idea to have a versus article between WordPress and Movable Type. […]
Farwell Sam

February 19th, 2007 4:49 am

“Whilst” is a horrible word….
Kirja » Migrando a Wordpress

March 23rd, 2007 7:27 am

[…] En fin, podría extenderme sobre las ventajas de Wordpress y deshacerme en alabanzas, pero creo que lo mejor que puedo hacer es recomendar a quien esté pensando en montar un blog que lo pruebe. Incluso si no se tiene una cuenta en un servidor donde instalarlo, o no se quiere entrar en cuestiones técnicas, existe un portal donde se puede crear un blog basado en Wordpress sin más que registrarse. Yo por mi parte pienso seguir disfrutando de este software durante mucho tiempo y, a partir de ahora, este blog proseguirá tras el primer arranque en falso con nuevos cimientos. No en vano Wordpress se ha convertido en el sistema de creación y gestión de blogs más popular, así que en serio… ¿a que estás esperando? ;) Entradas relacionadas: […]
Reply on Movable Type at Successful Blogs

June 18th, 2007 11:27 pm

[…] read by bloggers, and are hugely influential. Take a look at Darren Rowse’s comments: Wordpress vs Movable Type. So, yes, they may have a massive user base, but I’m guessing it’s fairly […]
http://www.howmuch.co.nr/

August 16th, 2007 7:14 pm

Id say WP all the way. More plugins, easy to install, more themes.. Try it out. Install couldnt be more easy. Setup database, get php to work, run install. Done..
Melanie Cameron

September 7th, 2007 2:30 am

I need some serious blogger expertise. Our site is entrenched in MT’s modules and templates and … I worked way too long as a manager attempting to decipher it all, and crashed my site once.

The hosts we use charge $50/hr, and oftentimes overestimate on hours needed. I can’t independently make cosmetic changes to the site because of how the div classes are set up.

I would really appreciate some consultation on:
A - What am I missing from Movable Type? How are all of these different pages related? What are its capabilities that we are not taking advantage of? How can one make cosmetic changes possible without relying on the host?
B - If MT is not really the best, most manageable, user-friendly option, then is WordPress going to work for us? How long will that kind of project take to bring our MT to WP?

site: www.edspresso.com
contact: melanie (a) edreform.com

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Written on June 21st, 2005 at 05:06 pm by duncan

WordPress vs Movable Type

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Written on June 21st, 2005 at 05:06 pm by duncan

WordPress vs Movable Type

What next?

Related Posts

95 Responses to “WordPress vs Movable Type”

Leave a Reply

Subscribe to enternetusers

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