Movable Type vs. WordPress
Not a screen-writing question, I’m afraid — more a “Geek Alert” one.
I’ve got a blog on blogger.com at the moment, and am thinking of moving to a different blogging tool. I’m a techie by background (computer science degree) now working in film visual effects (currently on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), and would love to have much more flexibility than blogger.com gives.
How have you found WordPress vs. Movable Type? They are the two that I am currently thinking about switching to, and would love to get your take on the two. How flexible are they, and do they allow you pretty much any access to the data that you would want?
– Hugh Macdonald
London
In another post, I’ll talk about blogging recommendations for the not-so-technically inclined.
It sounds like you, Hugh, are geeky enough that either WordPress or Movable Type will work fine for you. WordPress is done in PHP, while Movable Type is (mostly) Perl, so if one of those languages is more your strong suit, let that be your guide. And if you don’t feel like climbing under the hood, the default installs of either WordPress or Movable are pretty powerful, and both have plug-ins that let you do a lot without touching a line of code.
There are some technical and philosophical differences between the two systems as well. WordPress generates each page on-demand (at the moment someone requests it), which allows more flexibility in design and upkeep, at the cost of a slight delay in page loading. Movable Type, on the other hand, stores static pages that can be loaded very quickly — but can slow down when you make a change that ripples throughout the site. In recent revisions, both Wordpress and Movable Type have taken on some of the other’s strengths — MT can generate certain page on the fly, while plug-ins for WP allow it to cache frequently-requested pages.
Both in terms of pricing and spirit, WordPress is “more free” than Movable Type. Movable Type is an honest-to-goodness company, with the goal of making a profit. For a single user, the MT software costs $70. WordPress, on the other hand, is open-source, and free. Both platforms have active support forums, but in my experience, the basic documentation on Movable Type is better.
I found WordPress much easier to install, however. The trickiest part is setting up the MySQL database, and the instructions do a good job explaining that. Movable Type has a much better exporting system, which ironically makes it a lot easier to move from MT to WP than vice-versa.
In summary, they’re both good. My gut tells me you’ll pick WordPress. But if you really want to impress the geeks at the FX bay, also check out Ruby on Rails, which is very much roll-your-own, but allows for immense customization.
Articles
April 12th, 2005 at 10:56 am
Thanks for that, John!
I was feeling a little impulsive today, so actually went ahead and installed one (and yes, you were right – I did go with WordPress…!)
A nice little tool exists for taking all the posts and comments from a blogger.com blog (which was nice), plus a little tweaking to the default theme has given me a ‘workable’ version of WP to use for the moment…
The admin page for WP is very nice, although there is the occasional omission, it seems (how do you change the order of your link categories? Not on the admin page… oh, you have to edit the php of the templates…)
I’ve resisted the temptation to hack around with the php until I can take a look at how the plugin architecture works – otherwise I’ll just end up with a mess…
There also seem to be a lot of “Recent Comments” plugins – which one is it you use on here? Or was it a roll-your-own?
Anyway, thanks for the comments! I might have to take a look at Ruby on Rails… I’ve never used Ruby (python through-and-through here…), I’ve been hearing more and more good things about it recently…
April 12th, 2005 at 11:06 am
Well, Ruby on Rails isn’t a weblog tool per se. It’s a full web-application development framework built around the Ruby programming language. You can very well develop a blog engine with it (Typo is just that) or any other application for the web. It’s definately the next big thing in the webdev world.
April 12th, 2005 at 2:12 pm
Also worth the mention might be TextPattern or for the more hassle free but at a price solution TypePad by the makers of MovableType.
April 12th, 2005 at 4:23 pm
JackSim is right; Ruby on Rails goes far beyond a conventional blogging system. It’s certainly interesting technology, and a good way to leverage the strength of Ruby, a language I worried was never going to catch on. (Although Python still fits my brain better.)
TextPattern is one of many alternative systems out there, each of which has strengths and supporters. Here’s a site which compares many of them.
In the next few days, I’ll try to have another article up for ordinary-folks blogging solutions. In the meantime, please continue to use this thread for any experience, opinions or questions on blogging software.
April 12th, 2005 at 10:33 pm
When my host dumped all my data, I switched from pMachine to Wordpress and find that Wordpress is a breeze. Terrific right out of the box. Over a short period of time, I’ve also picked up a little coding here and there to tweak it. So far, loving it.
Word of caution, back up your database regularly. Otherwise, you will lose all your posts if the host’s server crashes.
(Thanks for the great blog, John.)
April 13th, 2005 at 4:36 pm
Just a minor correction: MT now has an option for dynamic page generation.
June 17th, 2005 at 9:15 pm
Movable Type v. WordPress Aaron’s CC is debating the merits of Movable Type and WordPress. Here’s my take on the matter. Up until a few months ago, my blog used Movable Type and then one day I decided that I would switch it over to WordPress. I can’t say tha…
October 22nd, 2005 at 1:25 pm
I successfully installed Wordpress on my site a couple months ago but I never got around to doing anything with it. So far WP looks like a great blogger, except it’s limited to pages with the .php extension.
If I decide to use my Wordpress to bring in traffic and boost my Google ranking, should I make my homepage, Wordpress’s main page, turning my site into a “blog” site, or should I be fine running Wordpress entirely within it’s installation directory? Is it ok to name a blog directory ‘/blog/’ or do the search engines frown upon this?
As other people post their site URLs in their posts, can that hurt my Google ranking, if they’re a spam site?
Do blog sites in general build ranking and traffic on Google faster than a standard static page site? Would I be better off hosting my blog on my own site instead of at blogger.com?
November 16th, 2005 at 6:57 am
[...] JohnAugust: Movable Type vs. WordPress Answers: How have you found WordPress vs. Movable Type? They are the two that I am currently thinking about switching to, and would love to get your take on the two. [...]
December 22nd, 2005 at 1:18 am
[...] I spent some time evaluating Movable Type and WordPress (both of which are not available on Yahoo! Web Hosting), and came down on the side of WordPress. I played around with both, did some Web searches on debates of the pros and cons of each (a good overview is here). At the end of the day, I decided to go with WordPress. One big factor is that WP uses PHP, which I am a big fan of, and is the Web scripting language of choice at Yahoo! where I work (the creator of PHP also works for Yahoo! and many of Yahoo’s biggest apps are built on PHP and MySQL). MT uses Perl, which I am not a big fan of, so that was a big factor in the decision. WP also seems to have more developers building plugins and themes for it, so that also helped tip the scale. [...]
January 29th, 2006 at 12:56 pm
Has anybody tried Typo with Ruby on Rails? I’m looking at blogging software and web frameworks now. I know more Python than Perl. Just enough html and css to be dangerous. Sounds like WordPress is easy, but perhaps insecure, given what has happened to John A. (see Bunny Slippers) and a few others I know. Thanks for any tips.
rick
March 7th, 2006 at 1:46 am
Has anyone seen anything for fastcgi, or isapi?
In other words, something based on c?
July 6th, 2006 at 11:38 am
Wordpress is great! I’ve used both Wordpress and Moveable Type. I prefer Wordpress… strong open source sommunity, wonderful interface, PHP based.
August 16th, 2006 at 10:25 pm
[...] Movable Type vs. WordPress [...]
October 23rd, 2007 at 3:50 am
For me, MT is great because it generates its pages in html, so I can easier edit them.