Movable Type 3, Wordpress or ?
July 27, 2004 | 
48 Comments
Changes are coming here at Asterisk.
How soon and how widespread are still to be determined, but I’m pretty sure most of them are going to be under the hood. My current “platform” isn’t working all that well, for a number of reasons, and I need to do some maintenance and upgrades.
While I’m at it I’m going to refresh and redefine my brand, my publishing process, my domain (!!) and maybe even the design. But don’t worry — there’ll be no full redesign here. I don’t think.
In any case, I’ve been going back and forth about whether I want to switch to Wordpress or upgrade to Movable Type 3. Right now I’m running MT 2.661 and it’s served me well, but it’s time to move forward. I’m leaning toward MT 3 simply because it’s known, but WP seems pretty attractive as well and I’m not entirely opposed to looking into something else. Although it may be a hard sell.
I’ve done a bit of research and have yet to come to a conclusion, so I thought I’d ask my readers what they think I should do. I’d be especially interested to hear from those of you who’ve used both, and those whole either upgraded to MT 3 from 2.6x or switched from MT 2.6x to Wordpress.
I’d love some advice, some recommendations and to get some lessons learned from y’all.
It might be good to note that I plan on starting with a fresh install regardless of what I go with. Meaning if I go with MT 3 I want to install fresh and import my entries.
Some of what I’m looking for moving from MT 2.661:
- Much better comment management and spam filtering, although I don’t really like Typekey and don’t plan to use it.
- Much more speed on rebuild.
- No more comment hang, although to be honest this might be a server issue.
- Easy conversion of my templates.
- Support, or conversion, of my plug-ins.
- Flexibility. I like to get creative with how I use my fields, tags and plug-ins.
- A clean, easy-to-use UI.
- Easy administration.
- Subcategories (hopefully without a plug-in).
- A cool photo display plug-in.
Filed under: Web General
Comments
1. Sean King said:
Don’t know if you’ve seen this yet, but you should check out the features of MT 3.1 before making any decisions. Seems to address a lot of your list.
Posted on July 27, 2004 10:51 AM | #
2. Keith said:
Sean – thanks! Hadn’t seen that, must be pretty new and yes it does address some of my needs. More food for thought…
Posted on July 27, 2004 11:10 AM | #
3. Jason Santa Maria said:
Yes, what Shaun said, and for comments, MT Blacklist 2.0 will be the granddaddy. I just upgraded from 2.6 to 3.0 this weekend and switched over to MySQL and it was easy as pie. There isn’t a howl lot that is new in MT yet, but just wait. With the new framework they just put into 3.0, they opened the door to developers. This thing is going to be leaps and bounds beyond where it is now in under a year’s time.
Posted on July 27, 2004 11:10 AM | #
4. Brian Groce said:
I’m in the “MT 2.6x to Wordpress” camp. I’ve been using WP for a few months now and from my experience so far, I give WP two thumbs up.
Addressing your list…
SPAM wise, I’ve had some, but not nearly as much as I did with MT. It has built in moderation and there are some plugins out there.
I love the fact that I don’t have to “rebuild” files all of the time. The content is totally DB driven, which is a plus and minus depending on whom you talk to. But there are some caching plugins available.
It runs quickly on my setup.
Template wise, you really only have to deal with one. Again, a plus and minus depending on whom you talk to.
The plugin structure (API) is great and is constantly improving/growing. If you know PHP, it’s quite easy to sit down and create a WP plugin.
Administration is simple.
Subcategories are present.
There are some photo plugins I’ve seen, but haven’t used.
Other items of note…
The largest drawback of WP at the moment is that there is no “multiple blogs” feature. But it’s coming sometime in the future.
And the best thing I love about WP is the development community. It’s very active at the moment and things can get hashed out quite quickly.
My 2 cents,
Brian
Posted on July 27, 2004 11:11 AM | #
5. Mark said:
Yes, Sean, that would be my advice too. Allthough the rebuild did not really improve. I am interested in a change too, but there is no blogware out there that plays in the same league when you look at the features, plug-ins and UI-style and which is “baking” instead of “frying” the html, which I personally prefer. I have read about an interesting approach named “funky caching” build into a very alpha-stage blogware called Vellum which sounds very promising. I would love to see that built into MT. That would solve the only problem I still have with MT.
In MT 3.1 especially look at the new Commenters-Management, Subcategories and the Winners of the Plugin-Contest.
Posted on July 27, 2004 11:16 AM | #
6. Jeremy Flint said:
I have been using WordPress since just before SXSW back in March.
I looked at MT, but decided to go with WP for some reason. I have been happy with it.
I am redesigning the website for my church and using WP1.2 for its news section.
The rebuild time is not even applicable because it doesn’t use static files. The comment posting, on my site at least, seems to be instant.
There are some plugins for showing posts from only certain categories, as well as the photo stuff. I have also seen lots of people talking about the transfer of content from MT to WP being fairly easy.
If you are wanting a full blown CMS for multiple pages, you might want to check out Textile. I was going to use it on the church site, but was wanting to get it up quicker so I went with what I knew for right now.
Posted on July 27, 2004 11:19 AM | #
7. Eris said:
If Textpattern hasn’t crossed your mind, you should look into it. Especially if you’re interested in tag flexibility.
Posted on July 27, 2004 11:32 AM | #
8. Jeremy Flint said:
Gah! Yeah, I meant Textpattern too.
Posted on July 27, 2004 11:40 AM | #
9. Keith said:
I’ve thought a bit about Textpattern, but was under the impression that it might be a bit more than I need and not quite ready for prime time yet. But if there are people out there using it now and liking it I’ll keep it in mind.
Posted on July 27, 2004 11:46 AM | #
10. Dave P said:
I use Wordpress myself, and I must say I’m really happy with it. I would recommend it to you highly. It’s really quite a well written system. (as a programmer talking here.)
One of the big advantages is the large active community. I recently laid out a requirement of a standards compliant, tableless photoblog interface, and found one easily.
I’ve heard textpattern is good as well, but I haven’t tried it.
Personally, the licensing of MT alone is enough to turn me off it for good.
Posted on July 27, 2004 11:53 AM | #
11. Chris J. Davis said:
Hey Keith,
I am an avid WordPress user and sometimes WP developer. The bottom line is you need to do a test install and put the system through its paces.
There is no other way to really know if it is right for you. And like others have said we are addressing the issues as fast as possible, but I think it is fair to say that at 1.2 WP is pretty feature rich and powerful.
If you want to get a site up and running and have any questions or requests I or any others in the community would be excited to address them.
Cheers.
Posted on July 27, 2004 11:54 AM | #
12. Anil Dash said:
Obviously, I’m biased, since I work for Six Apart. But here’s a rundown of how MT 3 covers your key points:
Much better comment management and spam filtering, although I don’t really like Typekey and don’t plan to use it.
TypeKey’s completely optional, so you don’t have to use it by any means. Aside from comment registration, there’s a full suite of management tools for comments and trackbacks in MT3. Spam filtering is best handled by MTBlacklist, which will be shipping as part of the plugin pack with MT 3.1.
Much more speed on rebuild.
MT3’s got much faster rebuild speeds, and with 3.1, you can choose on a per-template basis whether you want to have rebuilds at all. (I’d recommend something like static pages for XML feeds and dynamic pages for older archives.)
No more comment hang, although to be honest this might be a server issue.
I’m curious to know more about this. Feel free to email me if you have any comments about the problem you’re having.
Easy conversion of my templates.
Your existing MT templates will work as-is in MT3. You can update them if you want to use new MT3-specific features.
Support, or conversion, of my plug-ins.
Most MT plugins work right out of the box in MT3, except those that work with comments, since that area has changed a lot. Blacklist was the biggest example of one of those, and it’s been completely rewritten for MT3.
Flexibility. I like to get creative with how I use my fields, tags and plug-ins.
Amen. I think that’s been a big reason MT’s been so popular.
A clean, easy-to-use UI.
There’s been a *ton* of cleanup work on MT’s UI. Defaults throughout the application are smarter, and the new features have a really simple, straightforward presentation.
Easy administration.
That’s subjective, but I’m assuming MT’s easy enough for you to admin right now.
Subcategories (hopefully without a plug-in).
Built in with MT3.1.
A cool photo display plug-in.
MTPhotoGallery and a few other plugins do a great job. I’ll dig up some links to send your way.
Posted on July 27, 2004 11:56 AM | #
13. Derek Featherstone said:
It is a tough call, and it will come down to your personal preference. I freely admit that I never gave MT much of a chance – I outline a few reasons in a couple of posts I made when I got my WP blog running a while ago:
One Word: Impressive, and Choosing your sWord. Basically it comes down to a comfort level - I chose WP because I deal with the syntax of PHP pretty much every day. It made it very easy to understand, update, modify/whatever. I never liked MT’s custom tag syntax – it didn’t seem enough like coding to me (kind of like I feel about ColdFusion).
WordPress also has a nice Staticize plugin available, which I’m looking at implementing so that I can cache copies of files that rarely change – similar to the advantages of building with MT.
Also, not to limit things - I’d seriously consider TextPattern, as Eris suggested. (I suspect you haven’t ruled it out at this stage).
Despite the fact that I use WP, knowing that Eris used TP prompted me to look at it in more detail. I used it as an experiment in a recent site I built, and it was quite nice to use. If I can spend a bit more time with it, figuring out all of its intricacies and nuances, I might never build another site without using TP. Seriously.
Posted on July 27, 2004 12:01 PM | #
14. Keith said:
Dave P – The licence thing isn’t as issue for me. I just want good software and I’ll pay for that.
Chris – Thanks. If I go that route I might bang on your door.
Anil – Thanks for the run down. It does seem that 3.1 addresses many of my needs. That’s given me lots to think about.
Posted on July 27, 2004 12:08 PM | #
15. Keith said:
Another thing I’d like is better importing and exporting and entry management.
For example right now (with MT 2.661) I’m trying to export a single category for import into a new blog and can’t seem to do that in a straightforward manner. So I’ve got to export the whole blog and manually delete the categories I don’t need.
It’s a pain. A simple “Select all” for the checkboxes would be a big help…
Posted on July 27, 2004 12:15 PM | #
16. Todd said:
Nice timely topic Keith. I switched my blog over from MT to Wordpress last night. As I noted in the first entry I was having a lot of problems understanding the MT syntax and WP already makes more sense to me from that respect. I like the admin functions and interface as well. I have to start modifying the templates but that doesn’t seem to difficult.
Like some of the others have said, I think it’s important to test out a few CMS’ and see what you think of them. Different things work for different people. Overall, WP seems a better fit for me.
Posted on July 27, 2004 01:34 PM | #
17. Mike said:
Hey Keith-
If you’re looking to try something new, maybe check out Squarespace, the UI is really good, and the dev team behind it responds to user feedback extraordinarily well.
Other than that, I think MT3.1 may be the way to go for you. I’m positive you know everything there is to know about MT Template Tags and other stuff, so you might as well stick to what you know where there’s no learning curve.
Posted on July 27, 2004 01:35 PM | #
18. Matt said:
I’m not biased at all, but here are my thoughts. ;)
Commenting
WordPress is the most sophisticated tool in the market right now with regards to remote and local commenting. If you were to look at the comparative “features” on a chart it might seem like WP has less, but that’s because we do what’s needed in an unobtrusive manner that Just Works without exposing a lot of the piping to the user. Ask anyone who uses WP and they’ll agree the preemptive moderation is a pleasure. I haven’t had single spam on my site since last December, while at the same time my traffic has been increasing. Ask Molly about how her spam situation has changed since switching.
Speed
Not much to say here. Posting is instantaneous. Commenting is instantaneous. Editing is instantaneous. WordPress scales very well, I’ve never seen anyone complain about that. If you’re really worried about performance you can use my new Staticize plugin which works completely transparently, giving you the best of both worlds. Some people make a big deal about a page taking a tenth of a second to generate, but Google takes longer than that when I do searches and no one ever complains about Google’s speed. I’m glad to see MT 3.1 will be catching up in this regard, but as I understand it there are issues with MT tag-based plugins on MT dynamic templates using PHP. In other words, none of the current tag-based plugins will work with MT’s dynamic templates. Every WordPress plugin works on every WordPress page, and new plugins come out every day.
Custom Fields
In WordPress any post can have any number of custom fields attached to it. Doesn’t get much more flexible than that.
Subcategories, posting to the future, dynamic templates, etc.
This is all in WordPress 1.2 that you can download today, and has been in WP for months. No need to wait. Early versions of WordPress were inspired a lot by MT, which at the time was the best tool out there. It’s good to see some ideas flowing the other way.
Some entries from people that switched:
Mark Pilgrim
Molly 1, Molly 2
Eric Meyer
Ethan Marcotte
It seems long-time MT users sometimes have conceptual troubles switching in that they’ve learned to do things one way and a different way is uncomfortable. However if you have any problems there are thousands of posts in the forums to help you, dozens of people in the chat channel 24 hours a day, and if you have any troubles or concerns feel free to email or IM me personally and I’d be happy to help.
Posted on July 27, 2004 01:39 PM | #
19. Chris Hester said:
I’d advise you to look at this program: BLOG:CMS
Here’s why.
I’d advise you to avoid Wordpress.
Here’s why.
Food for thought.
Posted on July 27, 2004 02:06 PM | #
20. Faruk Ates said:
I suggest switching to WordPress, because:
Posted on July 27, 2004 02:55 PM | #
21. Ethan said:
Just to clarify Matt’s point from above: I was not a Moveable Type user before switching to WordPress. sidesh0w was running atop a homemade (read: “poorly developed”) PHP/MySQL CMS, and WordPress presented the easiest, cleanest upgrade path. In all honesty, I’d seriously considered TextPattern before making the switch, but the developer’s refusal to support date-based URLs was going to make the switch a veritable hell.
But that’s neither here nor there: MT, TXP and WP are all stellar pieces of software, each with its own endemic strengths and flaws. At the end of the day, it’s more about your comfort level with each program than it is about the available feature set — I’m probably pointing out the exceedingly obvious, but that’s really all I’m good for. ;)
Posted on July 27, 2004 02:56 PM | #
22. Cody Lindley said:
Try textpattern, its flexibility surpasses anything WP or MT has to offer. And by that I mean that WP and MT by design manage a weblog while textpattern by design manages content. WP and MT can be manipulated to act like a cms tool, but textpattern from the get go has you covered. I think you should give Hicks migration notes a read.
Posted on July 27, 2004 03:00 PM | #
23. Cody Lindley said:
Keith
In addition to the link I just mention, if you haven’t already read it I would give this entry & comments from Hicks site a good read.
Move away from MovableType
Sorry for the second post.
Posted on July 27, 2004 03:12 PM | #
24. Dave P said:
Chris: That’s quite an interesting diatribe regarding wordpress. A few points:
1. Keith is currently serving this page as text/html, so he probably won’t have the same issues you had. Although those issues are valid nonetheless.
2. The link on your page seems to illustrate the stellar support the wordpress community present, as illustrated in these posts.
3. Regardless of your status, taking the time to make an anti-wordpress image strikes me as juvenile and immature. Let’s not forget that this is free software, and people have put their time and effort into it for no real benefit so that we don’t have to.
If the software doesn’t meet your standards, so be it. There is no reason to belittle the work of the developers in such a fashion. Quality criticism is one thing, outright mocking of people’s work is just plain rude.
Food for thought.
Posted on July 27, 2004 03:15 PM | #
25. Jacques Distler said:
I took a long hard look at WordPress around the time WP 1.2 and MT 3.0 came out. I even went so far as writing plugin software for WP, on the thought that I might eventually make the switch.
At that time, I came to the conclusion that WP did not meet my needs. Here’s an abbreviated laundry list of what was lacking.
Your needs may differ from mine.
Posted on July 27, 2004 04:18 PM | #
26. Donna Maurer said:
I spent much of my university semester break setting up a new weblog in Wordpress (haven’t released it yet - need to write some better content).
My reason for choosing wordpress over movabletype (which I have been using for 2+ years) was its ability to do multiple categories/subcategories.
For me, the major limitation of Wordpress is that it really only allows one template (at a stretch I figured out how to do a home page, category and post template). This means that every page looks like every other page. Maybe I’m odd, but I wanted my home page to look different to an post page (I have links on the home page that I don’t want everywhere), search results to have their own template etc.
It is still a geeky tool. If you want to do more than paint the default template, you have to do a bit of work and have a pretty good understanding of xhtml/css (I know that you do, but the posts on the support forum are showing that many people are installing it without this experience and really getting stuck).
I’m happy with it, but need to learn more about php so I can extend it to do more…
Posted on July 27, 2004 04:21 PM | #
27. Rich said:
Wordpress all the way. Here’s my write up on why I switched from MT to WP:
MoveableType to Wordpress Switch
It’s faster, better architected (IMHO), easier to maintain, easier to build plugins for, and all in all, a lot less clunkier than MT. I know it’s not on your list of requirements, but for me, one of the things that turned out to be a welcome benefit is that I saved disk space. Since my post entries are all in a DB and not replicated in individual html files, my site’s size went down quite a bit. Something to consider if you’re disk quota is on the lower end. Good luck and I hope the move goes smoothly.
One more thing… I just clicked on Preview and it timed out on me. You’ll never get that with WordPress. Commenting on WP sites is a lot faster… consider that for your readers.
Posted on July 27, 2004 05:02 PM | #
28. Molly E. Holzschlag said:
Keith, how goes? I can only add my poor story here. Matt already pointed to the relevant posts, so let me sum it up easy and sweet.
I am extremely happy with my move to WordPress. This does not mean that I don’t advise others to choose from a variety of blogging tool offerings.
I might teach it but I’m only beginning to understand this fact: Use the right tool for the job.
I wanted open comments. In my situation, MT, despite the wonderful Jay Allen personally helping me on an almost daily basis to deal with comment spam, I was a major target. My ISP refused to continue dealing with me because the server molly.com resided on was brought to its knees twice due to spam floods. I was spending up to two hours PER DAY to undo the spam much less post.
Since switching to WP, I’ve had exactly five emails sent to me automagically for moderation. 3 of them were spam, 2 were just enthusiastic posts with multiple links from a reader.
Either way, I had instantaneous access to accept or delete those posts.
I have what is perhaps a bad tendency to post and then edit. Go figure? But that’s what I do. So instant editing is a great features of WordPress. With Movable Type, it was a huge drama with rebuilds, during which time I could make a sandwich, take a swim, make a fresh pot of joe, and come back and yes, rebuild was still going on (this is only a minor exaggeration).
MT 3.0 Interface doesn’t do it for me, sorry to my friends at Six Apart. Here’s the thing. I think MT is on a fast-track to becoming an awesome product for low-level CMS management. I have clients that lick this stuff up as if it were mother’s milk, and I admire Six Apart for giving me such a reasonable solution that’s affordable and mangageable at that level!
My site needs the flexibility and instantaneous publishing effects, as well as great spam management, so it’s a no-brainer. WordPress is my choice. And despite whatever support I could conceivably expect from MT, I just hop into #wordpress if I want to find someone to help me out with PHP customization.
No disrespect to Anil, who has my total love and admiration, or Mena and Ben, who do too. My concern, again, is the right tool for the right job. WordPress and its many enthusiastic supporters answer my needs. For my clients, MT might be the better choice right now. For my mom, I suggest Blogger.
Best tool for the job. I’m sticking with that. :)
Always,
Molly :)
Posted on July 27, 2004 05:31 PM | #
29. Kevin O'Keefe said:
We continue to look at WP and may jump if we decide to build our own open source solution. MT is attractive though.
Comment feature on MT 3 works great and I dealt with a lot of spam & delete problems with 2.6. Now easy to approve commenters with email alert taking to nice interface.
WordPress backend interface is not that great but with someone with your experience that’s not a big deal.
Our MT 3’s are rebuilding much faster than 2.6’s and we have down some hacks with the templates to improve speed.
Subcategories are now coming in 3.1 at the end of the month, assuming comes on time. That will save us a bunch of time in setting up the templates we do with subcategories.
On another issue, don’t believe WP produces static files which is great for speed but may be less attractive for search engine optimization purposes. I suppose it would not be hard to write program to produce those pages.
Posted on July 27, 2004 06:43 PM | #
30. SM said:
I can’t really speak too much about the other platforms, but don’t forget about ExpressionEngine. It’s an incredibly powerful system, and modular at it’s core. (An image gallery is scheduled to be released very soon.) It’s quite amazing, really.
Posted on July 27, 2004 07:54 PM | #
31. Matt said:
Chris, the Literary Moose document is riddled with inaccuracies and false statements. Apparently he was initially ticked off because I took longer than he thought I should to reply to an email he sent to my personal address. (Not the WordPress address.) Several people, including myself and Dougal, tried to address his concerns afterward but he had already made up his mind and written that hateful document. The bug he found (an unencoded ampersand that showed up only under certain conditions) was fixed within days. Anne van Kesteren (another WordPress user) filed some bugs in the bug tracker that were only issues if you ran the admin section (not your site itself) in application/xhtml+xml mode and they were all quickly fixed. Obviously myself, Anne, Lars, and others have been running WordPress in application/xhtml+xml mode for a very long time now so it’s not a problem for most people. I would have written a full essay addressing it when it first came out but honestly it wouldn’t make a difference to him because he’s already made up his mind and said the discussion is closed and me writing about it would just point more people to what is essentially a propoganda document. If WP were as broken as he claims it is, I don’t see how anyone (including myself) could use it. So take that with a big, big grain of salt. Before passing it along you should verify its claims yourself.
The links in my earlier comment are people who switched to WordPress, but not necessarily people who moved from MT.
Jacques, the backslash bug that affected your Tex/MathML content has been fixed and so your plugin should work flawlessly in the upcoming 1.3 release, which is just around the corner.
To test out 1.3, which has a ton of admin improvements, you don’t have to part of an elite beta group or anything. Anyone in the world can download a nightly build or check out the latest code in the public CVS. Anyone in the world can also file a bug or feature request in our public bug tracker and have direct input into the development of WordPress.
Posted on July 27, 2004 09:06 PM | #
32. Isopixel said:
Hi Keith ;)
Mmm, i think change a Word Press a few weeks ago…
MT 3 is a lot problematic, it work slowly, slowly, slowly… I am really desperate and I do not recommend to you update to MT 3, if it could, I I would return to TM 2,6, was a little more efficient.
Posted on July 27, 2004 10:21 PM | #
33. Jacques Distler said:
Great to hear!
Long ago (when the backslash bug made them sorta moot) I submitted some patches so that the Texturize/Textile/Markdown filters would play nice with MathML content. From browsing the latest CVS, it looks like they never did get incorporated. I guess they need to be reworked for 1.3.
They are, however, necessary for my plugin to “work flawlessly.”
Posted on July 27, 2004 10:31 PM | #
34. Ian Gordon said:
Keith,
I have to say that in your best choice, it comes down to actually installing the software and using it.
Testing is a definate must when you are making the transistion from one system to another. So, test, test, test and when you are done testing…test some more ;-)
Posted on July 28, 2004 12:10 AM | #
35. Jon Hicks said:
Keith,
Although I’m a big fan of Textpattern, WordPress may be more suitable for your site. As you don’t have lots of different sections, you may be able to run the whole site from one installation of WP. Having said that, the feature list of MT 3.1 looks mighty impressive - if it happened a month or 2 earlier, I probably wouldn’t have switched.
Posted on July 28, 2004 12:58 AM | #
36. Egor Kloos said:
I’m in proces of rebuilding my website and I’m using Expression Engine by the pMachine team. It’s not free but it’s the best thing I’ve seen so far.
http://www.pmachine.com/
Posted on July 28, 2004 02:45 AM | #
37. Jay Allen said:
Hey Keith. A few words of advice:
First of all, you should forget everything (and I mean EVERYTHING) you know and have ever experienced with regards to comments and trackbacks in 2.661. Between MT 3.x and MT-Blacklist 2.0, it’s a completely different world. In fact, many things are siginificantly better in the new MT world.
What I would suggest to you is to migrate to MT 3.01D because it doesn’t take a whole lot of effort. You don’t need to change your templates much, you don’t need to change your thinking much, you don’t need to learn anything new (much). Or at least not as much as moving to an entirely different software program.
Wait for MT-Blacklist v2.0 to come out (probably this weekend). Then, see how it goes. I might even go so far as to say wait for MT 3.1, because of the serious new features of the feature release (3.0x is a developer’s release). If all is not well at that point, then by all means, move to WordPress.
But not holding on tight long enough to experience the biggest changes and shifts the MT platform has ever known is a lot like breaking up with – let’s say – Famke Janssen in high school because she was tall, gangly and ugly.
Posted on July 28, 2004 05:03 AM | #
38. mattymcg said:
I’m going to cast another vote for TextPattern, just because it is such an intuitive interface, manages the whole site and not just the blog pages, and has such a helpful and supportive community. I switched my hosting over to TextDrive too and have been blown away with the lengths that tech support and forum members go to help out.
Just download TXP, install it and have a play Keith. Yes there is a learning curve with tags, but it’s addictive. And while Molly is right in saying you should choose the best tool for the job, I am repeatedly convinced after using TextPattern for client sites that it is amazingly scalable from small blogs to larger sites with static and dynamic content.
Posted on July 28, 2004 06:08 AM | #
39. Small Paul said:
Only one option here: learn some server-side languages, and build your own. Then it’ll be EXACTLY how you want it. Then go back in time to 1998 and sell this crazy ‘blogging’ idea for 3 million bucks. (And as a favour, tell my younger self not to buy his first iMac a week before the entire line is refreshed.)
Posted on July 28, 2004 06:44 AM | #
40. Yuriy said:
If you wish to have more than just a blog (even as perfect as WordPress), if you are going to use not only post-by-post basis but a page-by-page as well - you should have a look at TextPattern. Very promissing and flexible engine for those who need something more than just another blog tool. As for large community - have loop at TXP forums, look at plugins developed and hail to a new King! ;)
Posted on July 28, 2004 07:51 AM | #
41. Chris Hester said:
DaveP - forgive me for not making clearer that I did not write the article on Wordpress I linked to.
Posted on July 28, 2004 08:14 AM | #
42. Keith said:
Thanks everyone…man, that was quite a bit to absorb and think about. As of right now I’m still leaning toward MT 3, simply because I know it. But I think I may spend a day or so tinkering with some others and see where I end up.
I’m not sure if you all made the decision easier or harder…either way it’s good to know that there is some great blogging and CMS software out there to choose from and that they have active and engaged communities.
Posted on July 28, 2004 09:40 AM | #
43. Matt said:
Good luck Keith! For those of you who want to manage more than just your blog with WordPress, what Txp would call “sections,” I recommend checking out the Faked Folders plugin. And of course you can have static files and just edit them through the template editor like MT.
Posted on July 28, 2004 10:29 AM | #
44. Sian said:
I’m very, very comfortable with MT and it does everything I want it to, especially with the forthcoming release - blacklist, less rebuilds, subcategories, post scheduling, and multiblog.
I have got Wordpress running as well and will probablly use it for my photography site whenever that’s ready. Wordpress is far, far easier to install than MT.
Posted on July 28, 2004 11:46 AM | #
45. rADo said:
Well, BLOG:CMS has way more functions and is way more configurable than WP, aka FrontPage of the blogging world. You shoud never downgrade from MT to WP. Please. MT is a very decent system, and BLOG:CMS has all features that MT has, great admin interface, and many more. Support application/xhtml+xml natively, both in front-end and very advanced back-end. And is GNU GPL licensed. :)
Screenshots:
http://blogcms.com/item/blog-cms-screenshots
Download at:
http://blogcms.com/extra/download
Posted on July 29, 2004 04:17 AM | #
46. rADo said:
Well, BLOG:CMS has way more functions and is way more configurable than WP, aka FrontPage of the blogging world. You shoud never downgrade from MT to WP. Please. MT is a very decent system, and BLOG:CMS has all features that MT has, great admin interface, and many more. Support application/xhtml+xml natively, both in front-end and very advanced back-end. And is GNU GPL licensed. :)
Screenshots:
http://blogcms.com/item/blog-cms-screenshots
Download at:
http://blogcms.com/extra/download
Posted on July 29, 2004 04:18 AM | #
47. Ian Gordon said:
I decided to create my own weblog / CMS. I am unhappy with all the systems listed here, none of them have the functionality I am looking for, most of them have either some or are lacking seriously in features I am looking to do.
I am guess it will be a couple of months before this script is really usable but, just know that if you are looking for a good system in the future, maybe in a couple months just let me know, I should be completed or near completion. Check the thread here for more information:
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=184690
Just keep your mind open, I am sure you will find the solution that is right for you.
Posted on July 29, 2004 10:04 PM | #
48. Noir said:
I used WordPress for a while and I hated it. It was so much harder to make things attractive than it was with MovableType, which I’m currently using (3.01D) and plug-ins for it were harder to find. This may have changed recently but I would still recommend MT over WP any day, mostly for the following experience: one day after I had been using my WP blog for about a month, I went to my blog to check for comments and none of the entries loaded. The layout was there but instead of seeing my pages of entries, I only saw a bunch of MySQL errors. I never could recover WP or figure out what had happened.
A friend of mine recently switched to Pivotlog, a PHP-based blog tool, and seems to like it. I have not tried it.
Posted on August 15, 2004 09:55 AM | #
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