A WordPress 2.5 Upgrade Guide
As you might know, WordPress 2.5 is about to be released, and we wanted to encourage WordPress users to upgrade. To Movable Type.
The truth is, there are lots of good blogging tools out there, and they're all good at different things. But since upgrading from older versions to WP 2.5 can mean changes to your themes, plugins ("print your plugins list"!), and site, we thought we'd take a minute to explain why it may make sense to make those changes in Movable Type instead. For those people in the blogging community who've never taken a look, or who haven't seen MT in a while, you might just find some surprises.
Get Better Tech First
If you're into the technology of blogging, you've probably been hearing about technologies like Atom and OpenID for a while, and paying attention to newer innovations from Action Streams to iPhone interfaces to OAuth. But for things like Atom and OpenID, WordPress users have had to wait months or even years to get capabilities that Movable Type has pioneered. If you want OpenID commenting support on your blog today, Movable Type has had it built right in since the initial launch of MT4 last year -- we got a little bit of a head start there because Six Apart is where OpenID was invented. And we're not resting on our laurels; support for the newly-updated OpenID 2.0 specification is coming to MT shortly as well. Powerful new web services connected by OAuth are also right around the corner, letting you to keep control of your password without having to share it all around the web just because you want to try out a new web service on your blog.
This kind of stuff isn't new for us: Movable Type was the first an early blogging platform to support plugins at all. [Update: As always, we should have assumed Dave Winer got there first -- Manila had plugins much earlier.] MT was the first to have support for Creative Commons built right in. And it's not just that we participate within existing open source communities to create new standards like Atom, OpenID 2, and OAuth, we also work with companies all over the web to be partners on the OpenSocial project and [a totally non-evil implementation of] Facebook's Beacon on TypePad. Basically, we think that playing well with others makes for a better platform.
Takes a Digging, Keeps on Ticking.
Question: How should you greet the onrush of visitors to your site when you get onto the homepage of Digg or Reddit? Answer: Not with a Database Connection Error. A lot of people have asked us over the years, "Why does MT default to generating static web pages?", even though there's the option to publish fully dynamic pages. The reason is clear, as WordPress core developer and Automattic employee Donncha O Caoimh says, "[U]nder high load, serving static html files will always trump dynamic PHP requests." With Movable Type, the default settings have always been set so that you have a site that's reliable right when you're about to get the most traffic, without having to hunt down, install, or configure any plugins. So when a crowd of people come to your site, they can read what you wrote (and click on your ads, if you're into that sort of thing) instead of wondering what everybody was looking at.
A Dashboard That Measures Success
One of the biggest goals in redesigning our dashboard for Movable Type 4 nearly a year ago was to get out of the habit of merely listing a bunch of recent entries, comments, and pages. The truth is, you need those listing screens to manage your blogs, but on a dashboard that stuff just ends up looking like another inbox full of clutter to manage. So MT4's completely customizable dashboard has a powerful set of visual representations of your blog's behavior, from charts of the number of entries your authors have created to sliders that let you zoom in and understand why you got more comments on certain days. And of course there are lots of third-party plugins for the MT dashboard, to integrate statistics and information from third-party services like your number of FeedBurner subscribers.
Design Matters
Movable Type was the first blogging platform to use completely CSS-styled, standards-based templates by default, and since then we've worked like crazy to give smarter, prettier tools to everybody for customizing design. We have a strong belief that creating a theme or editing a design shouldn't require knowing PHP or figuring out whether parameters go in the order of "format, before, after" or "before, after, format". In fact, template tags shouldn't be writing HTML markup for you at all -- so in MT, they don't. And the tools for managing and customizing those designs look as good as the designs themselves, as you can see with the Movable Type Design Assistant. The Assistant is designed to help regular bloggers think about their blog's design with some of the insights and perspectives of a professional designer. And the StyleCatcher system built into Movable Type lets you install styles from repositories on the web, without having to manually upload a bunch of theme files to your server.
Plugins Are Good. Not Needing Plugins Is Better.
As the platform that first popularized blogging plugins, Movable Type has tons of them. But even better, there are a huge number of features that would require either the installation and configuration of a plugin, or moving to a completely different platform like WP-MU if you were using WordPress. Instead of wasting time trying to install all those plugins, and then keeping up with the inevitable security updates for them, or compatibility updates whenever you upgrade your software, you can use MT's built-in features and just worry about what you want to say. Some of the key features that are built in to MT that you might want to try out:
- Manage an unlimited number of blogs with one install
- Share templates and widgets across all the blogs in your system
- Easily manage tags
- Upload, manage, and tag any kind of files with a complete Asset Manager
- Lots more items that are still on the WordPress wishlist, like image resizing, searching of posts and pages, OpenID, a customizable dashboard, a better WYSIWYG editor, and more
And when you finally do want to do more with your site, in addition to all of the plugins which are available, you can also add in extensions to the platform like the Movable Type Enterprise Solution, for integrating with business-grade infrastructure, and Movable Type Community Solution, which enables features like user profiles, forums, Digg-style ratings, recommendations, and more.
Get Support Right From The Source
One of the signature features of Movable Type is perhaps the most hidden: Our excellent support. Instead of search around on Google for information that may or may not be out of date, or trying to figure out an obscure chat channel to get answers, paid users can simply file a help ticket and get access to the best support team in the business. It's just one more way to focus on what you want to say with your blog, instead of fighting with technology problems.
And Lots More To Come...
Now, the truth is, we're far from perfect. There are still a lot of times when MT installation takes a lot more than five minutes, though we're working on fixing that. (But of course, having a lot fewer security updates means you're not updating your blogging software all the time, so it can even out.) And MT can import all of your WordPress entries, comments, pages, and content with no problems. Right now, our whole developer community is focused on improving the raw performance of the core platform. But there are also still tons of new features we want to add to the platform as soon as possible. Whether it's adding support for OpenID 2.0, OAuth, or OpenSocial, making the application faster and more responsive, or working with the community to bring users new themes and plugins, we're 100% focused on our responsibility to continue to invent the future of blogging.
Movable Type is a blogging platform that's reliable, innovative, beautifully-designed and full-featured. Having spent years being both inspired and humbled by the creativity of the blogging community, we'd also like to point out that Movable Type might just be the right platform for a blogger like you.
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Anil Dash, de 'Chief Evangelist' bij Six Apart (waar ik werk) publiceerde gisteren A WordPress 2.5 Upgrade Guide, waarin gebruikers van WordPress worden aangemoedigd om n.a.v. de nakende release van WP 2.5 (die normaal gisteren voorzien was maar blijkb... Read More
I can sum it up in one word “Security” I have never had a MT install exploited. Cannot say the same for Wordpress. I missed one of their frequent security updates and my mom’s blog got exploited in less than... Read More
Anil Dash has an interesting upgrade guide for Wordpress. I think this is only deserved, after the upgrade path opportunity... Read More
The big thing WordPress has going for it is still host support. I click a button and poof! installed, poof! upgraded.
OpenID/OAuth are supported via plugins. ATOM feeds (evil) supported in core. AtomPub supported in core. There are multiple actionstream plugins.
Not dissing MT at all, some of the stuff you guys are doing is great. There's pros and cons to both sides, however (not to mention that a different PHP solution, like Drupal, can almost be easier sometimes). I'll leave you alone now, but I'm sure expected at least one reaction like this when you name your competition inline ;)
Wordpress also has some advantages in first-timer ease-- its functionality is easy for novices to find and use quickly, even if they haven't blogged before. Same goes for themes (especially the breadth of easily-locateable ones) and templates.
Even so, my recent foray into using MT (with Action Streams) showed me that it may well be the better *upgrade* path, as you say. Maybe it's time for changes to my blog as well.
You guys are both 100% right -- the experience of getting MT up and running needs to be a lot easier, and part of that will be getting the one-click installs in place on a bunch of web hosts, which we're working on.
There are also things we can do on our side -- like the InstaMT project for Windows installation. Thanks for the feedback, we like to see a balanced conversation about this stuff.
Wordpress upgrades aren't half as bad as people make them out to be, and I'm not talking about the one-click installs/updates offered by hosts.
The very reason we use power platforms is so that we can control and mould it like we want to, otherwise we would all use Blogger now, wouldn't we? (j/k)
I'll make a point about plug-ins that you've mentioned. Security and install hassles come with any third-party software. I've never tried MT, but I'm very sure if I run around forums enough, I'll find enough stories against MT too. Same goes for pretty much everything. No-one can get everything right for everyone.
Comparing your product to a competitors by putting them down is not going to hold you in good stead (as I'm sure you've seen by now by the posts on TechCrunch and Twitter conversations), even though you might feel the need to make direct comparisons to pull people.
Ultimately, MT might have got to a lot of features first, but Wordpress is what people still hear about more. Let's treat platforms for what they are, not how they stack up. That's what people without facts do to persuade others.
It also makes for more civil rhetoric. You can (and should) be passionate about Movable Type without snarkily putting down WordPress. Although some of your MT "plusses" are debatable (e.g. monolithic core vs simple core) and others are not quite accurate (WP fully supported APP out of the box before MT), MT4/OS certainly has made great strides in the last year and is a great product (especially the FOSS version). I think you serve potential switchers better by focusing on your product's benefits than by pointedly denigrating the competition. I don't think you're as antagonistic towards WordPress as this post is coming off, so I hope this is just tongue-in-cheek that didn't land properly.
And hey, sorry I didn't get to say "hi" at SXSW... saw you a few times, but you were otherwise engaged or on the other side of a crowded session hall.
-- Mark Jaquith (OpenID login seems to prevent me from identifying as anything other than my OpenID URL, unless that's just a preview bug)
Thanks for the comment, Mark -- the goal here is to point out what we do uniquely well. I could clarify Atom support re: 0.3 vs. the final APP vs. feed support, but I don't think there's any debate that we were founding members of the effort to create the standard, and that the WP embrace of Atom was conflicted at best. Regardless, everyone has access to it today, and that's great.
Now, I'm a snarky person, so maybe my sarcasm meter is off, but everything I've said here is sincere. I don't think there were any undue digs, but it's hard to point out a contrast in the two platforms without seeming like I'm just putting WordPress down. I would readily concede the title of the post was being cheeky. :)
And yep, I wish we'd caught up... it seems like SXSW just might not be of a human scale anymore, i'ts so hard to see people in person! I'll see if there's a bug filed on the OpenID issue.
Thanks for linking to WP Super Cache but I think you're being a little disingenuous by not mentioning that WordPress can produce static html files (like MT) with that same plugin.
If static html page generation is a reason for picking a blogging engine then it's not as clear cut as it once was.
WordPress blogs on many small hosts have survived a front page appearance on Digg now, with ease.
Anyway, there's plenty of space for both platforms, and the more diversity the richer our tools will become.
I've been using WordPress for over two years for my blogs/web sites. And overall I have been happy. I wish WP devs would look at this post and take some valuable information away from it. Here is a roadmap to make WordPress even better.
The MT Dashboard is beautiful. And the early versions of WP 2.5 admin I have seen was a huge step backwards. Inefficient to the point that I am looking into switching all my sites over to MT or Drupal.
I really love the multiple blog plugin included in MT. Far easier than multiple installs or even WP MU. My only really issue with it is I wish I could assign a url to the other blogs instead of just doing myblog.com/blog2. In some cases thats great, but in others, I would rather be able to associate a domain without having to be a DNS guru.
The MT install is confusing, but once I got it, it was pretty simple.
And as far as WordPress updates go, where is the difficulty? It's simple. The only thing I don't like about it is that I have to do it ten plus times over because I run multiple sites.
I came to this post after seeing Matt Mullenweg's tweet:
http://www.movabletype.com/blog/2008/03/a-wordpress-25-upgrade-guide.html
I must confess, with allegations of "desperate, and dirty" I was expecting something more dazzling than this. I would characterize this post as a bit cheeky, as Anil concedes in the comments, but at its core just competitive marketing with some dubious spin on some "advantages."
As a bystander, it's hard to say which is more inflammatory: this post, or Matt's Twitter response. And of course, Matt's response is cheeky marketing, too.
I think it's probably best if WordPress and Six Apart representatives stop attempting to classify the motivations of the other, and debate the post's feature claims instead. Competition doesn't have to be snarky, as Mark and Anil's interchange in the comments prove.
WordPress developers and users should take heart. What's happening hear is Anil recognizes WordPress as a major, if not the major competitor to self-installed Movable Type. Competitions in which the race is reduced to two leading candidates often feature snarky comments, but at least he didn't compare you to Ken Starr. :)
Note: I'm a WordPress user myself, but I'm also the developer of a popular desktop blog client, so I'm interested in and see pluses/minuses of most systems. An interesting side effect of this position, is that I compete with all of the blog systems (their web UI) but am also dependent on all of them for their APIs.
Phew .. I've seen the installation document to install Movable Type on Windows:
http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/docs/windows
Do you call that simple ?
Ok, granted that's installing it from scratch, but it's still far from what you would expect a newbie to do on his own.
Owen
p.s. I love the way you hook people in with this post
Honestly, this does sound like trash-talk. Sure, every blogging platform has a series of competitive advantages and it's perfectly ok to compare your product with the competition. But the way this post is framed makes it sound very agressive and, sorry to be so blunt, immature.
Now, I do use WordPress for some of my main blogs. Including a couple on WordPress.com and an old local WordPress installation. (I also have some Blogspot blogs.) As I'm not a coder, I don't even care so much about platforms, but I do like WP for what it's given me so far. If I were to move my old WP install to MT, I would like a "dispassionate" review telling me what to expect in the transition. Not just advantages of one platform over the other. A straightforward (and third-party) look at what it implies to go from an older version of WP to the most recent MT. That blogpost could include comments about what's ahead for Automattic, Matt Mullenweg, and WP.
Again, it's perfectly ok to describe MT's advantages. It's honest and "normal" (normative, almost). But there are ways to do it without making it sound like yet another platform war.
"I would like a "dispassionate" review telling me what to expect in the transition. Not just advantages of one platform over the other. A straightforward (and third-party) look at what it implies to go from an older version of WP to the most recent MT."
We'd love that, too. And we'd link to it. For better or worse, I find that most every comparison is from a partisan on one side or the other, or a general press story from someone who doesn't know the technology well enough. The most reasonable objective comparisons I've seen, from things like Forrester or Gartner analysis of blogging, MT always comes out very, very well.
Glad to hear you're not resting on your laurels with regards to standards support. There's lots of work left to do. Your home page, for example, contains 10 validation errors:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.movabletype.com/
This page contains 23 errors.
The standard is called XHTML, it's 8 years old.
That, plus an export format (something else you invented!) that includes little things like permalinks and internationalization support would mean a lot, certainly to the hundreds of people who do MT imports on WordPress.com every week.
It's not a good sign of times when your best arguments are your competitors flaws/differences/features.
Plus, you're mixing two stuff: official communication, which would have said "upgrade just as usual", and an article with incorrect references or informations (the article from blogherald).
Not the kind of article that makes me want to show some respect to MT.
As for dispassionate comparisons, I guess the trend of the user base size should be enough.
Matt, thanks for commenting. Our recommendation for exporting content is the IETF Atom Publishing Protocol standard, which represents a complete model of all the content in MT. The MT export format is, and has always been, incomplete. That's one major reason we started working on the Atom project, to create a standard for interoperability. I first explained that to you when I brought you to our office in 2004, and told you that I saw it as a positive if it made exporting from MT to WP better. I've re-explained it to you several times, as well as to other Automattic employees. I said it onstage at SXSW on Sunday, though I'm not sure if you were in that session. I'm happy to restate it today, and if I were a better PHP coder, I'd even try to help you create an Atom client to do the work. Alas, my gifts are all in the realm of Mario Kart. :)
As far as this site goes, I'm sure we'll get around to fixing the validation errors. As when you have, in the past, introduced a criticism of someone by noting they use a table-based layout, you've weakened your argument by making yourself look petty. I know that you, as do I, admire Jeffrey Zeldman very much. I'd note that, in all his advocacy of standards, and as a pioneer in the community for a decade, he's never once used the validation status of a page as an indication of the character, quality, legitimacy, or correctness of a person or organization. You would acquit yourself well, and do better justice to the amazing community we're both part of, if you followed that example.
Put simply, you say, "The standard is called XHTML, it's 8 years old." This is true, but we are not eight years old. And we're both above sarcasm about invention or anything else.
More to the point, the validation glitches are generally minor, easily fixable warnings that have nothing to do with the substance of this conversation. Donncha and Mark and a number of other WP team members have been able to participate constructively, even while strongly objecting to some of the points here, and all of us at Six Apart welcome that kind of conversation. I applaud their leadership.
I was an avid WP user. I even created several popular plugins. And then WP 2.2 broke everything.
WP 2.5 looks to do the same. I guess it's finally time to switch to a different platform. So far I've been looking at Drupal, but this post is a fairly decent argument for MT.
Sorry, my impression from your Migrating from Typepad to Movable Type page was that you still advocate the export format, even for moving between your own platforms.
The Atom Publishing Protocol support in MT 4.1 is failing the APE, so I can't say whether that is better or not, it may be a problem with the tester.
Anyway I'd love to learn more about your support of APP 1.0. The best information I could find on your site was this document which seems to indicate Typepad still supports version 0.3/Lifeblog, and the Typepad RSD still indicates that Metaweblog is the preferred API. Googling turns up odd results for Vox as well, but I may just be looking in the wrong place.
My biggest problem has always been the licensing. I can use WP for free regardless of number of users, or even ExpressionEngine for an unlimited number of users for under $300. MT'S pricing model does not appeal in that arena. Maybe someone can help me understand the difference between the commercial and open source versions...
How ridiculous is it running competitive web pages through HTML validators??
You and Matt seem to be misunderstanding the worst issue with the export in the Movable Type format. It isn't exporting from Movable Type -- the template can be changed, and I previously requested to you having that included in your documentation. The problem is on TypePad, there is currently no way to export permalinks.
This point may seem off topic to you, but I notice that TypePad and Open Social are both mentioned in your post.
This problem equally applies to people wanting to migrate to Movable Type, WordPress or any other platform.
I can't get excited about your open source, social work or your other "technology of blogging" until this issue is resolved.
Sam Rubel, People Magazine, and other customers I've worked with have felt trapped on TypePad. Although I've a number of tools in various states of development, an external software client solution isn't a satisfactory solution to most of your customers or ours -- it is just too complex.
At times I have been critical of SixApart when I felt they deserved it but I will say this. I am a happy MT user. While I have tried WordPress it is not in the same class as MT.
1st I have never had my blog hacked with MT, I have with Wordpress because it seems like every two weeks they are issuing security updates. One site I had on wordpress was hacked 2 days after a security release was put on the streets.
2nd I run all of my blogs on MT under one control panel. I can update templates without a devlopment degree.
The WP publishing system is simply junk. The one thing about MT is that you know what the page is gonna look like when you hit publish.
Overall between the two platforms I rank MT a 8-10 and WP 5-10
Anil, I completely respect sixapart as a company, but I jumped ship to Wordpress back when MT moved from being completely free to "free sometimes". The whole way that was handled (and I realize that that predates you) has left a horrible taste in my mouth. In fact, and probably unjustly so, my first reaction to this post was "what, is are they trying to lock more folks into MT before they decide to yank the free version completely out from under them?"
Wordpress upgrades are a pain in the arse, but to me, MT and Wordpress have always been pretty close in featuresets. There's nothing wrong with Wordpress' plugin architecture for extending functionality.
I think the most troubling part of all of this, for me, is that MT and Wordpress are both pioneers on the blogging scene. Seeing you and Matt going back and forth in this way, it seems more personal than professional. Stick to selling based on the merits of your product, not based on the shortcomings of your competitors' (customers will find that out for themselves).
I have split feelings in regards to this post. Forgetting my own situation and love/hate for WordPress or any other platform in that way, I must say this entry misses the punch to be a real argument to switch. Besides the nerd elements in it.
So I'll jump ship (I have played with MT4, use it on several sites, just as I use WP and EE) and say what I miss, what would really make me consider MT as only platform. And many things come in consideration here.
Obviously the many WP plugins and how simple some are. Also how used one has grown to them. Then there is the ease of use of other platforms (tumblr?)
What does MT argument with (in this post) towards the average, non code monkey user: many things are built-in already. Fair point, but are they the things one needs?
Here I go, food for thought for MT5 maybe?
- Use the Youtube APi (and other platforms): a link to the video should be sufficient to embed the video. The editor will allow to easily chose where to display the video in a entry (+alignment);
- Offer a simple 'bookmarklet', automatically configured for every created blog;
- Easy audio/video upload with flash player part of the standard modules. Editor support again;
- Make the admin frontend easier. Right now, even the experienced blogger (coming from WP) needs quite some time to find where everything is. It's almost as bad as with EE.
- There need to be advised plugins/modules for the switcher. The most popular plugins (at that moment) for WP, must be easy to find, without having to digg through all the plugins. Elements such as lightbox (keep it slim), subscribe to comments, akismet (I know, I know) and even the possibility to create easily a page for a lifestream(*) MUST be part of the core. The switcher must have the easiest job possible. The smallest learning curve, otherwise the idea behind this post, behind the title of the post gets lost.
Actually, the MT team should recreate the most popular plugins, maybe even create a theme converter, aso.
Just take a lesson from the browsers. IE6 to Firebird/Firefox was an easy conversion with little to no learning curve. The then (7.2.X-7.5) probably most powerful browser, Opera, had a huge learning curve for the non nerd/geek.
Switching from MT to WP is for most people not as easy as importing some entries and comments is.
(*) This should be automatically retrieved from your OpenID. Yes, go social. Why would I bother maintaining (and authorizing) my OpenID for everything, if I even can't aggregate all this in the platform offered by the OpenID creator. I want my del.ico.us, ma.gnolia, flickr, aso data to be aggregated as nicely as tumblr does it, better even and support the open platform. Build me that one platform to go to.
Then combine everything with all the awesomeness MT has and all the platforms might keep each other on there toes even more.
We all know the 3-4 main platforms, so let's go the self-confronting way... which is easiest to configure as custom CMS: Drupal, EE, MT or WP?
Let's learn from each other and improve each other. Smugless.
Hm, you made me at least go and check out MT again. From the Features:
WTF? No it's not. I would question that there are even 100 million unique web sites if you ignore domain squatters - in fact surely there's much less than that.
OpenID is great and all but let's not pretend it's some kind of ubiquitous mega-standard. I don't even like it - the idea of having my comments tracked across sites bothers me.
Honestly, with the advent of frameworks like Django and Rails many technically able people should just write their own blogs. MT and WP have very little modern functionality that people actually care about - I know one person who switched from WP to a MySpace account for this reason. Pretty sad that running your own software gives you *less* functionality than using some horrible SNS but it's so hard to upload anything in both WP and MT that I can't really argue she's doing the wrong thing ...
Matt's not supposed to be sarcastic, but you readily admit that your post had some "cheeky" elements. It's all well and good to take the moral high-ground, but shouldn't you make that a consistent approach instead of baiting Wordpress users/devs, and then hypocritically doing so?
Anil, did you see Jeff Croft's post about Matt's markup validator? heh.
Movable Type commercial license: $295.95
WordPress commercial license:
$0.00
I'm not saying you don't get what you pay for -- just saying that I, like millions of other people, fall into that middle ground.
Just out of curiosity, just how much revenue do you have to generate from your blog in order to be considered "commercial"? A dollar? A hundred? $295.95?
I think competition is definitely healthy. However, the subject line alone in this post was clearly meant to do nothing but incite a riot.
Stating a case for one platform over another requires nothing more than a strong platform, and little wordsmithing.
I respect both of you as representatives as your company and I think you should keep the conversation going. Or battle in Mario Kart and have a beer together in Austin on me.
Scott (and Don), Movable Type is available under both commercial licenses and the standard GPL open source license. MT is just as free as WordPress, for anyone who wants it.
@hk: I attended the OpenID panel at SXSW and it was *packed*. Yahoo and AOL both offer OpenID support, as do some pretty popular web apps like Basecamp and Blinksale.
Just for the record: Greymatter was the pioneer.
You forgot the best part. It's pretty sad that the former forum moderator of wordpress.com and Wordpress Multiuser is now a MT user. Why? Because up above proves it. Instead of actually dealing with the issues presented, Matt and his fanboys coming running to defend the WordPress platform. Matt points out the problems with validation of the MT site but most of the themes over at wp.com do not validate out of the box. I wonder why he forgot to mention that. It's not the first time he's pointed out the faults of others and ignored that he does the exact same thing.
His lack of respect for the volunteers who day in and day out provide the first level of support for both wp.org and wp.com is amazing. His solution of throwing in support folks who didn't even know the Wordpress platform caused a lot of problems in the forums. Matt acts like a spoiled rich kid who wants everything his way and refuses to even consider the thoughts and opinions of others. It's a pity that Toni, Automattic's CEO allows this to continue and refuses to even respond to emailed complaints.
Have to admit though that the poll solution for MT is rather lacking.
"paid users can simply file a help ticket and get access to the best support team in the business".
And free users on WordPress have all of that for free.
Really, I myself had some moderators reply back to me on a forum post some times.
And... for free.
But dont shoot me right now, I will install and test out MT4 to see MT vs. WP vs. my needs.
Rui
Anil made some great points.
Please understand that I am posting from the perspective of a programmer who works for financial analysts.
1. Anyone who is supposed to be working on WordPress instead of posting here should shutup and code as if you may not be getting another round of funding. I am tired of migrating people from WP to Blogger.
2. Anyone who had their feelings hurt by this thought-provoking post or my comments should seek counseling for related issues, immediately. No really. Go now.
3. Altavista, Hotbot, Infoseek, Lycos. Ask yourself: how did they get pwned by Google?
4. MT and WP will eventually learn how to work together because VC funding is drying up. Linking the lifeboats together may increase chances of survival.
5. Whatever has a beginning has an end.
I may not agree with all of Mr. Dash's points, but, I will say this... Once passion and partisanism enter in, rational discussion has left. Naturally, when someone feels their pet project, into which much passion has been poured, is under attack, it's only natural that they'd defend it. That's true of both WordPress and MoveableType fans.
I've used both platforms for multiple years. I've written plugins for both platforms. I've had security issues with both platforms. I've had documentation issues with both platforms.
No system is perfect and it's a matter of trade-offs.
When I switched to WordPress during the Great Licensing Debacle, I found it easier to do certain things, including write plugins. At the time, I found a larger community of WordPress users to help me, in part, because a lot of the knowledgeable users of MoveableType were becoming SixApart employees and a lot of effort was going into taking SixApart public, instead of supporting users.
I didn't feel I was getting my money's worth to pay for MoveableType at the time. I "paid" for the free WordPress with a donation that they don't need.
But, you know, all that aside, it's been a long, long time since I compared the two side-by-side. Has anyone done this lately? Maybe it's time.
Who would you feel is truly qualified and unbiased, Mr. Dash? Throw down the gauntlet. Having used both systems in the past for multiple years, and being a professional geek, would you consider me qualified? Or, am I too biased because I currently use WordPress?
This is a very opportunistic post (not opportune!) but I won't go into that!
@Jorge
So you're "an avid WP user", with "several popular plugins"... Why didn't you link to you blog/site? To make your argument any good you'd have to provide some sort of way of us checking how your work got broken. Add to that the fact that you seem to be completely lost in what you're talking about which disproves the whole argument in the first place...
Show yourself if you want to make a point!
Back to the topic, I see no additional value on MT after reading this... I really like the whole actionstream concept but it's far from being revolutionary and even further from being unachievable with WP. I'd even say that most of the stuff you talk about here as "MT advantages" are perfectly attainable with plugins on WP... And add to that the bigger availability of WP plugins to do whatever you want to ;)
Oh well... Good luck to MT nonetheless... I just don't like the tone of this post, not to mention the title... :/
[Security and install hassles come with any third-party software. I've never tried MT, but I'm very sure if I run around forums enough, I'll find enough stories against MT too. Same goes for pretty much everything.
I'm not aware of a single instance of a plugin ever causing a security problem with MT. I could, of course, be wrong. Feel free to come back when you've actually, you know...used the software and have a proper citation rather than ominous hand-waiving.
[This comment regards this specific point only. I have my own issues with the overall post.]
@J Lane and other WordPress users
Movable Type Open Source is available under the GNU General Public License. That's the same license that WordPress falls under, making MTOS as legitimately open source as anything the WordPress team releases. The cat is out of the bag, and SixApart has to respect the terms of the GPL.
Levi,
Take some time to compare the quality of documentation, and features provided, for both platforms. I think you'd be shocked to find out how much more powerful Movable Type is internally than WordPress.
"Plugins Are Good. Not Needing Plugins Is Better." Is that the reason why MT comes in the form of a damn bloated *4.4MB* download? Please compare what's comparable. My typical WP blogs runs from 10 to 40 plugins. This sums up to waaaay less than 4.4MB.
Another point: my typical WP blogs is set up and running in less than 3 minutes. All I could get on my Windows test box after 20 minutes was an XML error page. I must say I'm definitely impress, maybe not in the good way.
About 30% of a stock installation of Movable Type is libraries taken from CPAN. There's nothing wrong with them bundling copies of these libraries to make sure that they're available to everyone who needs them. Second, Movable Type is a much bigger framework for development than WordPress. Just compare the developer docs for both platforms if you find that hard to believe. You complaining about Movable Type including so many 3rd party libraries and APIs for developers to use is like a C programming complaining about the size of the Java or .NET runtimes.
Since I don't like the current development of Wordpress - it is too much focusing on automattic's goals on wordpress.com - I'd like to give Movable Type a try. I have - in opposite to what a lot of people said here - installed and configured MT in less than 5 minutes.
However, 2 more problems persist: First, how can I get my URLs to stay the same as in my WP-install (domain/year/month/title), second, where do I get themes from?
Good work. I like this site. Thanks for sharing.. Egitim Exsohbet