Ha, I expect you'll start a flamewar over this. ;) I think it's horses for courses, and good to have competition. Certainly, MT has some really strong points.
Pete
· 2 years ago
BTW: I cut short the part about future outlook, which I think is unbalanced without equal time spent on both platforms. Still think you have a slight bias towards WP here (MT is waaay prettier in the admin area, imho), but not gonna edit your thoughts too much.
Brezeck
· 2 years ago
cgi...not everyone like it.
***V***
· 2 years ago
With MovableType going the direction of open source it's definitely worth a look. I enjoy the professional look of it, though Wordpress offers SO MANY features.
. . . Staying with Wordpress . . . for now.
Brezeck
· 2 years ago
My dreamhost gets a good support of cgi, maybe i'll install one for just fun
Brezeck
· 2 years ago
Where do they get the future outlook? Have a bigger one?
mrshl
· 2 years ago
I just installed Wordpress today. The kicker for me was the ability to have multiple authors for free. I loved how everything just worked right away. After previous installs of MT where I could never get the templates to work right, working with WP was a refreshing change.
Byrne Reese
· 2 years ago
*kicking self*
We have in the past done a very poor job of communicating about our licensing, especially when it has changed... for a while now the free Personal Edition of Movable Type has allowed for:
* unlimitted blog * unlimitted authors * unlimitted page views
It is constrained in only one way: if you are using your blog to power a business, then you need to purchase the Commercial Edition.
Movable Type 4 has also completely rearchitected its templates to be easier to work with and has introduced something like 50-70 new template tags to give designers greater control over their templates without the need for plugins.
Anyway, regardless of what platform you choose, we are just happy that you are blogging. Hearing what people like and don't like about any platform helps us make our products better, which in turn makes our competitors products better. Aaaah, the circle of life.
skarld
· 2 years ago
Two big thumbs up for WordPress! The number of themes and plugins is staggering, and the documentation and community are excellent. There is nothing that can't be done with WordPress.
Brajeshwar
· 2 years ago
I've been a die-hard fan of Movable Type since its early stage. MT powered by blog from 2002 to 2005. However, Wordpress was much better that in 2006 I moved totally to Wordpress never to look back. The only thing I missed in Wordpress was its inability to have multiple blogs with a single installation and WPMU is a bad choice.
For a personal or single and medium sized blog, Wordpress is the best choice. However, for corporates (like that of the Adobe weblog) I still think Movable Type is way better. It installs once and handles any number of blogs.
Byrne Reese
· 2 years ago
We are sorry to have lost you as a community member and user. Hopefully you will think about trying out a free demo of MT4 at http://www.movabletype4.org/. I would be curious to hear if you still think Wordpress is better, especially because you are someone who was a long time user and ultimate grew frustrated by it. We have tried soooo hard with this release to listen to our users, and to fix all the things that had been annoying them for so long.
I think there are lots of reasons to switch back. But of course I would say that, I am the product manager. :)
Scott
· 2 years ago
I would like to see the Movable Type version of this post.
Michael Vu
· 2 years ago
Wordpress rocks!
Pierre
· 2 years ago
There are other points !! 1) MT is not really free (if you want to use MT in enterprise you have to pay) 2) hosting: MT need some special stuffs like Perl.. and you don't find perl everywhere in hostings 3) it's impossible to post by mail in MT (there are solutions for wordpress) 4) MT is more like CMS and you can do MORE than a "simple" blog... (we did for example www.ebg.nethttp://www.amor-lovelab.com/home.php and e-commerce site like http://www.kelprochoisir.com/ -will be launched very soon) 5) the fact that SixApart is a commercial firm and needs money is the key in evolution of MT. Without plugins and huge community, MT will be stay in the desert of "has been" softs and to avoid this, Mt need to be free.. but what kind of product will bring monet to sixapart ?? MT vs Wordpress is a battle between free and not free but in this case, both are "new" (no like windows and linux ;-)) wait and see.. (excuse my english)
Byrne Reese
· 2 years ago
Actually Movable Type has always been free. There has never been a release that did not offer a version of MT that required money to use. Personally I do think we chose an initial licensing model that was too restrictive, which is why we later made MT Personal Edition completely unrestricted in the number of blog and authors one could have in an installation... and eventually I think we made one of the best decisions to date:
To completely open source Movable Type. So this fall, not only will MT be free, but it will also be Free!
drmike
· 2 years ago
Actually WordPress is now a commerical outfit as well.
One issue that wasn't touched on was Spam control. MovableType has this built in while WordPress requires a plugin (which granbted is included but an account from their wp.com site is required)and a secure connection to one of their servers which may or may not be up and running.
Matt
· 2 years ago
I think MT4 does support comment feeds and comment permalinks, but I'm not intimately familiar, and they were the pick for that section already.
Thanks for the kind review! We're planning on including Sandbox with a future release which hopefully addresses some of the concerns with the CSS in bundled themes.
Michael Camilleri
· 2 years ago
I like to think I'm somewhat technically-inclined but I found the Movable Type installation instructions (http://www.movabletype.org/documentation/instal...) woeful. For instance, the instructions to upload the files to your web server are listed under the heading 'Step 3. Download the Movable Type Files'.
Dogen
· 2 years ago
Don't want to migrate from WordPress...
christen
· 2 years ago
Having used both platforms over the past couple years I have one thing to say: I HATE having to rebuild the MT pages.
Beyond that, I have to agree with the above comment about MT being good for larger sites especially where finer template control is required.
However, I still prefer WP for small and medium-sized sites though. Faster setup, no pesky perl, robust community.
Byrne Reese
· 2 years ago
I hate having to publish pages too. That is why I favor MT's built publishing queue which off loads all publishing to a background process. This means the app is faster (no more waiting for pages to be built), commenting is faster while keeping your site stable and scalable. The challenge with dynamic publishing, which MT also supports BTW, is that under load it can quickly bring a database to its knees.
Which, I imagine, is why the Wordpress WP-Cache plugin is so popular among Wordpress users.
MT's new documentation has a whole section on the publishing queue and how to enable it:
Thank you Byrne, reading your build queue comment just saved me a 2 and half hour wait for my 1300+ posts and 1100+ comments to rebuild. That's per rebuild. A couple of days ago, I needed to rebuild about for or five times because of some major work I had to do to the site. Boy was that annoying, as that was before I clicked the little box that enables queue. I'm very glad I did a short search and found your comment. Thanks again.
matt
· 2 years ago
As a developer, I have to say WordPress is truly the Bee's Knees. If you don't want to read a gushfest, stop now.
In 7 years of developing I've never seen a (server) software package come in at such a perfect balance of features vs. complexity. The line the WordPress authors drew between built-in features and pluggability was perfect. And yes, the number of plugins and themes available is staggering.
The architecture of WP is beautiful. Being a phpBB2 forum user/developer/admin for 5+ years, let me tell you, a well-architected application will save a developer/admin dozens or hundreds of hours over its lifetime. Gallery2, Joomla etc. can't touch WP for sheer architectural elegance. Don't know about MT.
I create small business sites, and I haven't created one without WordPress as its CMS in a year now.
And its free.
cpawl
· 2 years ago
I started out using MT and grew to hate it and went to WordPress. At my job, I manage their blog with MT. After working with so many WordPress blogs throught the years I have to say I am failing in love with MT again. For one, WordPress admin has always been a hard sell for professional use. It is HUGE and bubbly and must have been made for the blind. I literary had clients laugh at it. For two, WP security issues are annoying and regular. Every other upgrade has security problems.
I never really minded MT pricing situation.. to be honest I prefer Expression Engine over both of these. It is worth paying a price for great functionality.
Blake Brannon
· 2 years ago
I agree. Wordpress is by far superior. I tried MT a while back and there just is not enough support and plugins for MT as WP.
Abinidi
· 2 years ago
I have been using WP for about 3 years and have setup and customized it for many clients. When you have to deal with other people using a product, it has to be easy for them to understand and configure. WP does a great job at that.
I had one guy who was using MT for about a year and always had some issue finding what/where to do something, mostly due to him not understanding how to use it right. Once I moved him to WP, he was able to figure it out on his own in a few days how to do what he wanted to do.
Plus WP has so many plugins, themes and a large community to help with configuration and editing that it makes it comfortable to use. And from a programmer's stance, WP being wrote on PHP is easy, at least for me, to hand edit pages, whereas Cgi or perl is a bit more trickier.
MillerL
· 2 years ago
Drupal?
mike
· 2 years ago
that's ruby on rails...
Brajeshwar
· 2 years ago
@Byrne Reese: I did download a copy of MT 4.0. I've been tinkering with it to see if I should use it for some sorta-community blogging thingy. I'm sorry but I won't be moving from Wordpress for my personal blogs for now at least.
I'm still comfortable with the plethora of tags that MT has.
Nonetheless, yes, Matt was perhaps very true when he said - Wordpress has the perfect balance of what comes with it and what can be enhanced with plugins.
Honestly, at this moment, I hate wordpress for its inability to make me customize the (or rather add) anything in place of the "more" tag in a single post without requiring a plugin (and I haven't found a good high customizable plugin to do that yet).
Matt
· 2 years ago
We added a feature last year that might be some of what you're looking for:
Granted, the MT platform took a huge hit when developers who were unhappy with MT 3.0's licensing terms bolted for WordPress (even though those new licensing restrictions were quickly relaxed). It's been an uphill battle for the community. The new MT4 platform, though, looks extremely promising.
I've been using both platforms for the past four years. The fact that WP can run on almost any LAMP, MAMP, *AMP server is a definite plus, and I *love* the fact that for hosts with Fantastico, WordPress is a one click install and a one click upgrade.
For administering multiple blogs off of a single installation, though, MT is without peer. Also, I have always preferred MT3's well-organized admin interface over WP's, and I find MT4's admin interface to be even better -- even with the annoying hover menus that accidentally pop-up when you hover over them and sometimes refuse to go away on mouse-out.
This article failed to mention that the new default themes and style library themes for MT4 are top notch and look much easier to customize. I was getting sick of Vicksburg (the old default theme), and Vicksburg was a pain to customize. Also, the new ability to quickly switch from two column to three column layouts (and wide-thin-thin, thin-wide-thin layouts, etc) is slick!
I will call out MT's developers for the sloppy HTML code that the rich text editor generates for paragraphs (although I think I read that a fix is planned for the next point release).
Over the past few years, I also found the dwindling pool of MT plug-ins that were actively developed disconcerting. But with the new version, MT's developers claim that it is now even easier to create plug-ins, and there are already some great new MT4-specific ones in the Plugin Directory (http://plugins.movabletype.org). Hell, maybe someone will write a plugin to improve the hover menus.
Sean
· 2 years ago
Thanks for the nice article, however I still favor Wordpress even though I have never used Movable Type, I've looked into it in detail in the past.
Since i'm also an Open Source Developer, Wordpress gets all its boxes ticked from me and maybe when Movable Type releases its own Open Source version I might consider looking at it again...
Sean
Byrne Reese
· 2 years ago
Thanks for the nice article, however I still favor Wordpress even though I have never used Movable Type
Sean - I would love for you to take a look at Movable Type 4.0 (you can access a live demo at http://www.movabletype4.org/). Once you have tried I would be curious to hear your opinion after having seen and used both products.
And no matter which one you like better, please let us all know. The only way any of us can make our products better is by listening to each others users.
Byrne Reese PM of MT
aks
· 2 years ago
We evaluated several blog engines, and finally chose MT because, unlike most of the others, is able to generate completely static HTML pages that do not require DB transactions as part of serving pages.
In contrast, WP uses a DB for both read requests and write requests. Of course WP-Cache reduces the DB transaction rate, if the pages are designed such that they _can_ be cached.
We also chose it because of its extensibility, based on Perl.
However, I do wish it had a decent notification engine, so that we could drive website updates out as notification emails automatically.
Adam
· 2 years ago
It would be great if you can add EE 1.6 into the mix.
Jorge
· 2 years ago
I used MT back in 2003, but switched to WP in 2004 because I was so much more comfortable with PHP than with Perl, and that installation truly is a breeze. That said, MT really upped the ante on the new release: it's easier to use than ever. Definitely worth a look; in fact, I've installed MT on another blog and I plan to run both concurrently. Nice job MT team.
Jesse Gardner
· 2 years ago
Just curious... why do you use a screen shot from MT3 when you're talking about MT4. The new wizard is really nice...
Corey
· 2 years ago
Though the project is still in it's infancy, those who like WP and MT, may also like my CMS, Onpub. It's even easier to install then both WP and MT. Though we don't yet have nearly as much functionality, what does work tends to work extremely well. Also, Onpub has a very good API for creating sites (e.g. a blog) from scratch. Check out the project web site for more info: http://onpubco.com/index.php?articleID=6&se...
Mike Gravel 2008
· 2 years ago
MovableType only went Open Source because they noticed how WordPress was growing and expanding so much. MT was in the toilet, they had no choice but to go open source or die out.
Scott
· 2 years ago
I love how MT/SixApart employees are trolling this thread. Mmm. Desperation is the worst perfume.
Byrne Reese
· 2 years ago
I am hoping that one day soon that the presence and participation of a Six Apart employee on comment thread about a product they helped to build will be perceived for what it truly is: our taking an active and engaged interest in what our users are saying.
What is our alternative? To sit idly by and leave people wondering if we are listening to them?
I for one am happy to be here because after 500+ diggs and counting this post contains by far one of the most thorough discussions about a product and release I care very passionately about. Plus, with Matt Mullenweg participating in this thread as well, I couldn't be in better company.
Ram Prasad
· 2 years ago
It is just a matter of choice. * I have not seen many hosting providers that dont provide Perl (MT comes, IHMO, with its own libs so it does not depend on installed libs) * Themeing MT is lot more easier with Stylecatcher * Install once and create as many authors and blogs as you want (It was available in MT3 too.. people did not care to play with it in depth) * Static output: I could still have archives in plain generated HTML, so I dont need PHP around * Multi-site replication: Publish once, and rsync the files to as many LB server you want * Easier Virtualhosting * Spam Prevention (with inbuilt plugins) * Security and Upgradeability has been good too with MT
Being a sysadmin and a PHP developer, I still found WP harder than MT to maintain
my vote goes for MT. (WP is good too, but MT beats it by a small margin)
(now that it has been properly OpenSourced, we are bound to see more plugins)
- Ram
Andrew Punzalan
· 2 years ago
Wordpress simply rocks! I once used MT, Google's Blogger, Drupal and others. I must say that since I tried Wordpress, there's no more turning back!
D
· 2 years ago
Movable Type is a godsend because WP’s admin API is a joke. It’s a snarled, entrenched codepile that isn’t going to get better anytime soon. Both bill themselves as CMS-worthy, but WP just doesn’t cut it without massive hacking. Try doing any simple restructuring on the admin side, and you’ll see what I mean. Check out almost any admin plugin that does something interesting and you’ll see how many bad hacks it involves. Apparently the core team thinks “a break from a forced interface would be too confusing for users†and “there isn’t enough demandâ€, both of which are specious, to say the least.
tiago
· 2 years ago
I co-run a blog community from more than 3 years now, and since the beggining we're using MT. I admit that WP community makes a difference, but MT was always stable and 'logical' to work with - so we stick with it. we have a lot of authors and all of them found their way nicely with the system.
now waiting for some upgrades to happen around to safely make ours :)
and btw, I really enjoyed Byrne comments on this post. being a old-time user, I remember long silent periods when it seemed there was nobody there (well, except Elise from Learning Movable Type and Arvind, plugin-master). I have asked myself sometimes if I'd have to do a platform change due to underpower or commercial frenzy, but since the decision to go opensource and the releases of the beta versions of MT4, it was easy to note that 6A came back to their community again.
but whatever platform one chooses - it's always great to see the blogs moving forward!
The Geek
· 2 years ago
I used MT a few years back, I think it was 2.something and liked it very much. It did what I wanted and while I was confused about how somethings worked the user community helpful in helping me fix the issues.
However when I went to start a new blog after several years without one I switched to WP after 2 long nights of frustration trying to get MT to install on my hosts server. Even with help from other MT users I just couldn't get the cgi scripts to work. WP's install went quick easy and worked the first time.
Dodgypress
· 2 years ago
Have just outlayed some dollars, roughly 2gs euro on a custom theme, that I have used for two blogs. I have plans for some quasi commercial aspects later.
So am I to understand that, were I to say place some adsense and add banners on an MT platform blog, I would be classed as commercial, and hence, have to purchase a license.
Byrne Reese
· 2 years ago
@Dodgypress - Actually no. Well, technically the license is purposefully vague in this area to leave it up to Six Apart to determine if your blog is running for a "business purpose." We never want to preclude people from earning revenue from their blog, even under a personal license. I think however that if your revenue ever became a substantial part of your income, i.e. you were reporting the income to the IRS, then you may have surpassed the threshold of using MT for personal use. You know? And then we would like for you to pay. But we trust your judgement. To the best of my knowledge Six Apart has never had to enforce the license because most people are actually interested in doing the right thing.
Paul
· 2 years ago
So there's a line, no one knows where it is so you don't know where you cross it. And when you do cross it, whenever that is, you get a bill for crossing over the invisible line. What a great way to treat your customers.
That's one issue. My hosting company has had major problems with MT installations just completely taking over the server and causing the server to seize. This hosting company DOES know what it's doing so it's not them. It got so bad that they created servers that you can not install MT. I don't know what the issues where but they were out there.
Maybe it's different but without a compelling reason to change from WP, MT just isn't in the future.
Dave
· 2 years ago
Six Apart continues to provide a less then direct interpretation of their licensing terms. I think this has a lot more to do with the company trying to figure out the business model for the product then any other sinister purpose. I suspect SA only hurts themselves by not realizing revenue from individuals who 'report blog earnings to the IRS'.
Nicole
· 2 years ago
I've tried more CMS backends than I can count anymore or remember, and oddly enough I'm still always willing to try out a new one just to look at it, but I've become incredibly spoiled by WordPress. WordPress is my CMS of choice for practically all of my clients.
MT is not my favorite for some of the reasons already mentioned, but I'm going to be playing with the new version soon. EE is decent, but I think they ended up making the interface worse in more recent releases. Drupal is .. kinda like big beast working in the corner. It's not pretty and it's not friendly, but it gets the job done. Still, as far as competition goes - WordPress is still the current lead dog in all my development.
Dave
· 2 years ago
One of the things I have always wanted Wordpress and MT to include in their base packages is a role based permission system for content readers (not just admins). Plugins exist with both MT and WP which provide clumsy ways to secure posts on a post by post basis. To your point, Drupal (the beast in the corner) is becoming my preferred personal blogging solution since it allows me to control which readers access which posts. I've tried the VOX, MySpace, etc kind of solutions but in each case the reader has to accept having an account with the service to access controlled posts.
Dave
· 2 years ago
I continue to tinker with both products. The distinctions between them continues to blur through time. The technology underlying each really is the most significant differentiator. The licensing and publishing options available with both products are the secondary areas of importance.
Perl, like PHP, is almost universally available on *AMP based boxes (despite an earlier claim to the contrary). Because of the permissions PHP runs with, it will always be easier to install - and harder to secure. Choose your poison.
MT offers both static and dynamic publishing, while you can only use dynamic publishing with WP. For most smaller blogs this is not an important capability. Several caching solutions exist for both platforms although the need for caching is generally higher with Wordpress.
Because Wordpress has always been a liberally licensed open source product, web hosts offer simple installation options which make it much easier to obtain for casual users then MT. The licensing Six Apart chooses for MT 4.0 is (to my knowledge) undetermined but I am guessing they will move much closer to the Wordpress model. When they do so, it will become possible for web hosts to offer MT installation scripts which insulate the users from the file permission issues tasks which make the MT install more involved then the WP install.
At the end of the day, we are all better off with options. Competition between these (and other vendors) makes all of the products better. Each company has borrowed features from the other and we all benefit as a result.
Byrne Reese
· 2 years ago
*banging head on keyboard* Doh!
A quick FYI - After reading this thread and a couple of others across the Interweb about MT being slow to download, I did some digging and found what I think was a bug in how our downloads were being processed. Downloads were being streamed via a PHP script which had the unfortunately side effect of slowing things down. We removed this little bit of indirection and now link directly to the file from the download page. This allows the MT4.zip and MT4.tar.gz files to be downloaded far quicker.
It also has the added benefit of being compatible with wget so users can download MT directly to their machine without needing to download locally and then re-upload to their server.
Thanks to everyone who voiced their concerns about the speed of the download. We heard you and we fixed it.
Byrne Reese Product Manager, MT
Zach Wingo
· 2 years ago
I tried to install MT for a friend about a year ago, and I found it extremely frustrating. He hardly knew what a blog was and I tried to get him to use Wordpress but he settled for Typepad. After hearing some good things from knowledgeable people about MT 4 I decided to check out the demo. I'm really impressed with the improvements and from what I hear you upload your files, create the database and load the wizard does everything else, much like Wordpress.
I will be using MT in the future for sure. But for my personal blog right now I'll think I'll stay with wordpress until I become familiar with MT's template system.
Raj
· 2 years ago
I just started blogging this year and both my blogs are hosted on the free blogger platform. I was now considering moving it to a domain of own but was confused as to which blogging platform I should chose. (I am not too much of a techie) Thanx for the review anyway, I guess I will go with Wordpress for now after reading this because I don’t want to go with something that costs me and then is difficult to implement and is worse compared to it’s competitor…!!
Tino
· 2 years ago
cgi...not everyone like it.
This is the Point!
Dan
· 2 years ago
Just to clarify: Drupal isn't ruby on rails, it's simple php/mysql. But Drupal isn't a blogging software...
dcrellen
· 2 years ago
I want to get started blogging. I installed and tested WP on my Win2003/IIS server. Installation was a breeze. After reading user comments here, I thought I should test MT. The install has been a nightmare (the installation instructions assume someone is starting a new IIS server whereas I am hosting many websites). I finally got it all working and ran mt-check.cgi. This is as far as I can go because, although all of the requisite files are installed, according to the "Movable Type System Check", there is a bit of debug code preceding this form. It is "Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at D:\clients\www.ccx1.org\www\mt\mt-check.cgi line 124. Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at D:\clients\www.ccx1.org\www\mt\mt-check.cgi line 124. Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at D:\clients\www.ccx1.org\www\mt\mt-check.cgi line 124. Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at D:\clients\www.ccx1.org\www\mt\mt-check.cgi line 124.".
I tried to comment on the MT Install forum, signed up, but it won't accept my login. Thus, my conclusion is that if it is this hard just to get it started, what should I expect down the road after I get up and running.
Bottom line: MT is too scary for me.
Nakamura
· 2 years ago
i guess my blog post can save time and trouble to some people, as i installed MT 4 the first time and took screenshots of the process, resulting in quick instructions how to get you movable type platform running! anyway, ride in, check out, and if you see some bugs in my post, commento on it! http://www.superxm.com/2007/08/movable-type-4-i...
JimmyBoy
· 2 years ago
I've tried many systems, MT, WP, Drupal, b2Evolution, Expression Engine, etc. I prefer WordPress because it's free (I don't like MT's making a judgment whether I make enought money to pay them, it's either free or not people, don't leave people hanging, who are you?), has the most templates available (MT cannot compete), the most plugins available (MT cannot compete), WP has an awesome community (MT had a good thing going then they got greedy and alienated everybody, no 2007 "opensourcing" will help you overcome that bad karma). So despite the paid testimonials from MT, Wordpress rules.
Just look at the most influential blogs, from Mashable to TechCrunch or GigaOm -- all Wordpress. Yes, the Gawker network of blogs still uses MT but I read many posts by Denton and his tech people that they hated the rebuilding problems with MT, the server issues with huge spikes, the old Perl, etc. And they do have the insider line with MT, they are top customers. Let me give you an example: the Xataka Spanish blog network -- they started with Movable Type, now they are running Wordpress. They got tired of its problems, so much for "the chosen professional blogging platform".
Still, Wordpress needs to improve in one key area: being able to insert several loops in the same page. This is a big limitation, being able to have only one 'loop' or blog running. Another limitation, not being able to run multiple sites with one installation. I'm surprised everyone is so comfortable with WP having only one loop, because with multiple loops it would really be a "CMS".
And Wordpress should support WP-Cache natively, I think it's the KEY plugin for Wordpress, without it MT would have the edge for really popular blogs. My WP blog just wheathered 100,000 uniques (according to Webalizer, server's internal stats) on one day... thank God for Ricardo Galli's WP-Plugin.
And for MT, go full opensource without any "will judge how much money you make depending on whether you report to the IRS". Correct the bad karma, and do the modern thing: charge for support like MySQL or Linux vendors. If you don't, WP will rule forever, like Wordpress.com owns Typepad.com. Who would pay for your unreliable Typepad service when Wordpress.com is reliable and free?
I think that MT is way better than WP! There is a BIG feature that is missing in WP and that's "MultiBlogging". With one installation of WP, you'll ONLY get one blog but not in MT. And if WP has LOTS of plugiins, well MT doesn't need plugins. You can do it with it's core! You can build ANYTHING with MT and no pluing needed! (even a forum!)
Zeta S.
· 2 years ago
I only really started blogging this year, so not too much experience on this side. I'm also only the average technical savy guy in what regards server-side applications, so this hanged good in the balance too when I started looking for my blogging tool of choice. However, long story short: I'm currently and concurrently running MT4 and WP2, and haven't decided yet which to keep. Looks like it's going to be a tough choice though... I'm still testing their features.
Sheri
· 2 years ago
I'm reading this post specifically because of my experience upgrading from MT3 to MT4. I've been fighting with it for two weeks and seem to finally have gotten it stable.
Of course, I still can't comment on my own blog.
I'm seriously considering a switch to WP.
Ole Wolf
· 2 years ago
If you're going to compare Movable Type with Wordpress, you should consider the dynamic vs. static publishing that has been mentioned a few times in the comments.
The static publishing the MT4 provides may feel a bit slow, because the pages are rebuilt when you publish an entry. But in my experience, many web hosts have plenty of bandwidth for serving web pages, but their databases are the ones that slow down the pages. If your blog relies on dynamic publishing, the database can easily be a bottleneck.
In addition, if the database is down, your web page will be offline, even if the web server is up. If the web server is down, your site would be down no matter which blog you're using, but the combination of two services means that the probability of Wordpress being off-line is greater than the probability of MT4 being off-line. With MT4's static publishing, your average uptime will be higher than with Wordpress' dynamic publishing.
So, MT4's static publishing yields two advantages over Wordpress:
1. Better up-time. 2. Faster web content serving.
Both of these issues are key to successful content publishing, and I think you should have taken this fact into account in your comparison.
Kevin
· 2 years ago
I've been a die-hard fan of MT for awhile now, and I was so excited about the 4.0 launch.
However, I've been really struggling with getting 4.0 working properly. It's getting frustrating. I don't know if it's something I'm doing wrong, or is a hosting issue. I hope to get it figured out soon or I'm going to contract out some WP developers.
Pete
· 2 years ago
Some quick questions, hopefully I'll get some answers....
So I've got a handful of WP 2.x installs I run for some friends, and a personal WPmu that I run for myself. With the intentions of moving everyone else over to the multiuser install so I only have one thing to have to manage, update, etc. That's why the MT4 promise of managing multiple blogs from one install sounds great.
But at face value, I'm sort of disappointed at the number of MT4 templates (themes?). Ideally I'd be able to find comparable ones to what I've got for WP already, but it looks like I've got to find an alternative.
MT4 really doesn't have RSS feeds for comments? MT4 really doesn't have a way to password protect individual posts? I have some bloggers that use this feature quite a bit.
I'm still gonna poke around things a bit, maybe try and post my personal WP blog over to MT4 and see what it looks like. And now that the newest WP2.3 seems to have ruffled some feathers....but I dunno...WP has been a breeze and a dream. I just need a good way to manage multiple blogs, and WPmu is a pain!
rd Limosin
· 2 years ago
i vote for WP
www.newportcitynews.com
· 2 years ago
Great site keep up the good work
Climate change
· 2 years ago
Love this site really good info
Thanks
Mads Nygaard Pedersen
· 2 years ago
This is really a great debate... I recognize most of the pros and cons mentioned here. We normally run WP at www.iteam.dk, but I installed MT4 on my new pers. blog (www.evolver.dk) for testing purposes yesterday, and what strikes me as MT benefits: - Polished admin GUI (however, bells and whizzles don't make up for the drop down issues and the fact that extended core functionality makes clutter) - Multiple blog handling - Easy and VERY attractive 'get-template-by-url' feature (cannot remember exact name). Unfortunately, howeverbuggy in my experience so far. particularly when trying to add as a repository from http://www.thestylearchive.com/ - seems like the CSS files transfer allright, but the pics are left behind - refreshing/republishing doesn't help)
If the template issues got resolved along with the license clarity - MT4 would seem very promising - however it need more testing on my part...
daretoeatapeach
· 1 year ago
I have been using Wordpress for a few months and just got a MT blog. So far MT has been far less intuitive to figure out. Like you can't add users when you go to the User section. WTF? I thought I was going to chuck my computer through the glass door when I kept republishing and nothing was happening (The page kept loading from the cache). So far I have had to republish the site for every little thing because the partial publishings aren't clear to me what they cover. And what are assets and how do they differ from widgets? No explanation and no link on where to find them. I go to the widgets page and there are check boxes and the only option given is to delete them. My hacker boyfriend seems to like the guts of MT better but so far the GUI is not user friendly. I'm looking forward to learning Movable Type but I worry it will be an uphill battle.
Jason
· 1 year ago
I disagree. MT is far superior to Wordpress. Have they even added an image uploader to Wordpress yet or do you still have to add it?
Fred
· 1 year ago
Obviously you don't know anything about wordpress so your comments are worthless.
pdf maker 2009
· 4 months ago
WoW! Thanks a lot for sharing!
Francis
· 3 months ago
WordPress is definitely recommended because most systems will have an xAMP (X, Apache, MySQL, PHP) setup (x stands for the operating system's first letter - not to be confused with XAMPP which has both PHP and Perl). Movable Type can only run on systems with Perl configured and enabled. WordPress (particularly the MU edition) powers WordPress.com, one of the most popular blog hosting services on the web.
On WordPress, post data are stored in the database. On MT, post data is stored in an HTML file (which makes the database have little use).
Francis
· 3 months ago
WordPress is definitely recommended because most systems will have an xAMP (X, Apache, MySQL, PHP) setup (x stands for the operating system's first letter - not to be confused with XAMPP which has both PHP and Perl). Movable Type can only run on systems with Perl configured and enabled. WordPress (particularly the MU edition) powers WordPress.com, one of the most popular blog hosting services on the web.
On WordPress, post data are stored in the database. On MT, post data is stored in an HTML file (which makes the database have little use).
All Comments
. . . Staying with Wordpress . . . for now.
We have in the past done a very poor job of communicating about our licensing, especially when it has changed... for a while now the free Personal Edition of Movable Type has allowed for:
* unlimitted blog
* unlimitted authors
* unlimitted page views
It is constrained in only one way: if you are using your blog to power a business, then you need to purchase the Commercial Edition.
Movable Type 4 has also completely rearchitected its templates to be easier to work with and has introduced something like 50-70 new template tags to give designers greater control over their templates without the need for plugins.
Anyway, regardless of what platform you choose, we are just happy that you are blogging. Hearing what people like and don't like about any platform helps us make our products better, which in turn makes our competitors products better. Aaaah, the circle of life.
The number of themes and plugins is staggering, and the documentation and community are excellent.
There is nothing that can't be done with WordPress.
For a personal or single and medium sized blog, Wordpress is the best choice. However, for corporates (like that of the Adobe weblog) I still think Movable Type is way better. It installs once and handles any number of blogs.
I think there are lots of reasons to switch back. But of course I would say that, I am the product manager. :)
1) MT is not really free (if you want to use MT in enterprise you have to pay)
2) hosting: MT need some special stuffs like Perl.. and you don't find perl everywhere in hostings
3) it's impossible to post by mail in MT (there are solutions for wordpress)
4) MT is more like CMS and you can do MORE than a "simple" blog... (we did for example www.ebg.net http://www.amor-lovelab.com/home.php and e-commerce site like http://www.kelprochoisir.com/ -will be launched very soon)
5) the fact that SixApart is a commercial firm and needs money is the key in evolution of MT. Without plugins and huge community, MT will be stay in the desert of "has been" softs and to avoid this, Mt need to be free.. but what kind of product will bring monet to sixapart ?? MT vs Wordpress is a battle between free and not free but in this case, both are "new" (no like windows and linux ;-)) wait and see..
(excuse my english)
To completely open source Movable Type. So this fall, not only will MT be free, but it will also be Free!
One issue that wasn't touched on was Spam control. MovableType has this built in while WordPress requires a plugin (which granbted is included but an account from their wp.com site is required)and a secure connection to one of their servers which may or may not be up and running.
Thanks for the kind review! We're planning on including Sandbox with a future release which hopefully addresses some of the concerns with the CSS in bundled themes.
Beyond that, I have to agree with the above comment about MT being good for larger sites especially where finer template control is required.
However, I still prefer WP for small and medium-sized sites though. Faster setup, no pesky perl, robust community.
Which, I imagine, is why the Wordpress WP-Cache plugin is so popular among Wordpress users.
MT's new documentation has a whole section on the publishing queue and how to enable it:
http://www.movabletype.org/documentation/admini...
In 7 years of developing I've never seen a (server) software package come in at such a perfect balance of features vs. complexity. The line the WordPress authors drew between built-in features and pluggability was perfect. And yes, the number of plugins and themes available is staggering.
The architecture of WP is beautiful. Being a phpBB2 forum user/developer/admin for 5+ years, let me tell you, a well-architected application will save a developer/admin dozens or hundreds of hours over its lifetime. Gallery2, Joomla etc. can't touch WP for sheer architectural elegance. Don't know about MT.
I create small business sites, and I haven't created one without WordPress as its CMS in a year now.
And its free.
I never really minded MT pricing situation.. to be honest I prefer Expression Engine over both of these. It is worth paying a price for great functionality.
When you have to deal with other people using a product, it has to be easy for them to understand and configure. WP does a great job at that.
I had one guy who was using MT for about a year and always had some issue finding what/where to do something, mostly due to him not understanding how to use it right. Once I moved him to WP, he was able to figure it out on his own in a few days how to do what he wanted to do.
Plus WP has so many plugins, themes and a large community to help with configuration and editing that it makes it comfortable to use. And from a programmer's stance, WP being wrote on PHP is easy, at least for me, to hand edit pages, whereas Cgi or perl is a bit more trickier.
I did download a copy of MT 4.0. I've been tinkering with it to see if I should use it for some sorta-community blogging thingy. I'm sorry but I won't be moving from Wordpress for my personal blogs for now at least.
I'm still comfortable with the plethora of tags that MT has.
Nonetheless, yes, Matt was perhaps very true when he said - Wordpress has the perfect balance of what comes with it and what can be enhanced with plugins.
Honestly, at this moment, I hate wordpress for its inability to make me customize the (or rather add) anything in place of the "more" tag in a single post without requiring a plugin (and I haven't found a good high customizable plugin to do that yet).
http://wordpress.com/blog/2006/08/02/but-wait-t...
I've been using both platforms for the past four years. The fact that WP can run on almost any LAMP, MAMP, *AMP server is a definite plus, and I *love* the fact that for hosts with Fantastico, WordPress is a one click install and a one click upgrade.
For administering multiple blogs off of a single installation, though, MT is without peer. Also, I have always preferred MT3's well-organized admin interface over WP's, and I find MT4's admin interface to be even better -- even with the annoying hover menus that accidentally pop-up when you hover over them and sometimes refuse to go away on mouse-out.
This article failed to mention that the new default themes and style library themes for MT4 are top notch and look much easier to customize. I was getting sick of Vicksburg (the old default theme), and Vicksburg was a pain to customize. Also, the new ability to quickly switch from two column to three column layouts (and wide-thin-thin, thin-wide-thin layouts, etc) is slick!
I will call out MT's developers for the sloppy HTML code that the rich text editor generates for paragraphs (although I think I read that a fix is planned for the next point release).
Over the past few years, I also found the dwindling pool of MT plug-ins that were actively developed disconcerting. But with the new version, MT's developers claim that it is now even easier to create plug-ins, and there are already some great new MT4-specific ones in the Plugin Directory (http://plugins.movabletype.org). Hell, maybe someone will write a plugin to improve the hover menus.
Since i'm also an Open Source Developer, Wordpress gets all its boxes ticked from me and maybe when Movable Type releases its own Open Source version I might consider looking at it again...
Sean
Sean - I would love for you to take a look at Movable Type 4.0 (you can access a live demo at http://www.movabletype4.org/). Once you have tried I would be curious to hear your opinion after having seen and used both products.
And no matter which one you like better, please let us all know. The only way any of us can make our products better is by listening to each others users.
Byrne Reese
PM of MT
In contrast, WP uses a DB for both read requests and write requests. Of course WP-Cache reduces the DB transaction rate, if the pages are designed such that they _can_ be cached.
We also chose it because of its extensibility, based on Perl.
However, I do wish it had a decent notification engine, so that we could drive website updates out as notification emails automatically.
http://onpubco.com/index.php?articleID=6&se...
What is our alternative? To sit idly by and leave people wondering if we are listening to them?
I for one am happy to be here because after 500+ diggs and counting this post contains by far one of the most thorough discussions about a product and release I care very passionately about. Plus, with Matt Mullenweg participating in this thread as well, I couldn't be in better company.
* I have not seen many hosting providers that dont provide Perl (MT comes, IHMO, with its own libs so it does not depend on installed libs)
* Themeing MT is lot more easier with Stylecatcher
* Install once and create as many authors and blogs as you want (It was available in MT3 too.. people did not care to play with it in depth)
* Static output: I could still have archives in plain generated HTML, so I dont need PHP around
* Multi-site replication: Publish once, and rsync the files to as many LB server you want
* Easier Virtualhosting
* Spam Prevention (with inbuilt plugins)
* Security and Upgradeability has been good too with MT
Being a sysadmin and a PHP developer, I still found WP harder than MT to maintain
my vote goes for MT. (WP is good too, but MT beats it by a small margin)
(now that it has been properly OpenSourced, we are bound to see more plugins)
- Ram
Check out almost any admin plugin that does something interesting and you’ll see how many bad hacks it involves. Apparently the core team thinks “a break from a forced interface would be too confusing for users†and “there isn’t enough demandâ€, both of which are specious, to say the least.
now waiting for some upgrades to happen around to safely make ours :)
and btw, I really enjoyed Byrne comments on this post. being a old-time user, I remember long silent periods when it seemed there was nobody there (well, except Elise from Learning Movable Type and Arvind, plugin-master). I have asked myself sometimes if I'd have to do a platform change due to underpower or commercial frenzy, but since the decision to go opensource and the releases of the beta versions of MT4, it was easy to note that 6A came back to their community again.
but whatever platform one chooses - it's always great to see the blogs moving forward!
However when I went to start a new blog after several years without one I switched to WP after 2 long nights of frustration trying to get MT to install on my hosts server. Even with help from other MT users I just couldn't get the cgi scripts to work. WP's install went quick easy and worked the first time.
So am I to understand that, were I to say place some adsense and add banners on an MT platform blog, I would be classed as commercial, and hence, have to purchase a license.
That's one issue. My hosting company has had major problems with MT installations just completely taking over the server and causing the server to seize. This hosting company DOES know what it's doing so it's not them. It got so bad that they created servers that you can not install MT. I don't know what the issues where but they were out there.
Maybe it's different but without a compelling reason to change from WP, MT just isn't in the future.
MT is not my favorite for some of the reasons already mentioned, but I'm going to be playing with the new version soon. EE is decent, but I think they ended up making the interface worse in more recent releases. Drupal is .. kinda like big beast working in the corner. It's not pretty and it's not friendly, but it gets the job done. Still, as far as competition goes - WordPress is still the current lead dog in all my development.
Perl, like PHP, is almost universally available on *AMP based boxes (despite an earlier claim to the contrary). Because of the permissions PHP runs with, it will always be easier to install - and harder to secure. Choose your poison.
MT offers both static and dynamic publishing, while you can only use dynamic publishing with WP. For most smaller blogs this is not an important capability. Several caching solutions exist for both platforms although the need for caching is generally higher with Wordpress.
Because Wordpress has always been a liberally licensed open source product, web hosts offer simple installation options which make it much easier to obtain for casual users then MT. The licensing Six Apart chooses for MT 4.0 is (to my knowledge) undetermined but I am guessing they will move much closer to the Wordpress model. When they do so, it will become possible for web hosts to offer MT installation scripts which insulate the users from the file permission issues tasks which make the MT install more involved then the WP install.
At the end of the day, we are all better off with options. Competition between these (and other vendors) makes all of the products better. Each company has borrowed features from the other and we all benefit as a result.
A quick FYI - After reading this thread and a couple of others across the Interweb about MT being slow to download, I did some digging and found what I think was a bug in how our downloads were being processed. Downloads were being streamed via a PHP script which had the unfortunately side effect of slowing things down. We removed this little bit of indirection and now link directly to the file from the download page. This allows the MT4.zip and MT4.tar.gz files to be downloaded far quicker.
It also has the added benefit of being compatible with wget so users can download MT directly to their machine without needing to download locally and then re-upload to their server.
Thanks to everyone who voiced their concerns about the speed of the download. We heard you and we fixed it.
Byrne Reese
Product Manager, MT
I will be using MT in the future for sure. But for my personal blog right now I'll think I'll stay with wordpress until I become familiar with MT's template system.
This is the Point!
I tried to comment on the MT Install forum, signed up, but it won't accept my login. Thus, my conclusion is that if it is this hard just to get it started, what should I expect down the road after I get up and running.
Bottom line: MT is too scary for me.
anyway, ride in, check out, and if you see some bugs in my post, commento on it!
http://www.superxm.com/2007/08/movable-type-4-i...
Just look at the most influential blogs, from Mashable to TechCrunch or GigaOm -- all Wordpress. Yes, the Gawker network of blogs still uses MT but I read many posts by Denton and his tech people that they hated the rebuilding problems with MT, the server issues with huge spikes, the old Perl, etc. And they do have the insider line with MT, they are top customers. Let me give you an example: the Xataka Spanish blog network -- they started with Movable Type, now they are running Wordpress. They got tired of its problems, so much for "the chosen professional blogging platform".
Still, Wordpress needs to improve in one key area: being able to insert several loops in the same page. This is a big limitation, being able to have only one 'loop' or blog running. Another limitation, not being able to run multiple sites with one installation. I'm surprised everyone is so comfortable with WP having only one loop, because with multiple loops it would really be a "CMS".
And Wordpress should support WP-Cache natively, I think it's the KEY plugin for Wordpress, without it MT would have the edge for really popular blogs. My WP blog just wheathered 100,000 uniques (according to Webalizer, server's internal stats) on one day... thank God for Ricardo Galli's WP-Plugin.
And for MT, go full opensource without any "will judge how much money you make depending on whether you report to the IRS". Correct the bad karma, and do the modern thing: charge for support like MySQL or Linux vendors. If you don't, WP will rule forever, like Wordpress.com owns Typepad.com. Who would pay for your unreliable Typepad service when Wordpress.com is reliable and free?
Go WP, but please enable multisite and multiloop.
Of course, I still can't comment on my own blog.
I'm seriously considering a switch to WP.
The static publishing the MT4 provides may feel a bit slow, because the pages are rebuilt when you publish an entry. But in my experience, many web hosts have plenty of bandwidth for serving web pages, but their databases are the ones that slow down the pages. If your blog relies on dynamic publishing, the database can easily be a bottleneck.
In addition, if the database is down, your web page will be offline, even if the web server is up. If the web server is down, your site would be down no matter which blog you're using, but the combination of two services means that the probability of Wordpress being off-line is greater than the probability of MT4 being off-line. With MT4's static publishing, your average uptime will be higher than with Wordpress' dynamic publishing.
So, MT4's static publishing yields two advantages over Wordpress:
1. Better up-time.
2. Faster web content serving.
Both of these issues are key to successful content publishing, and I think you should have taken this fact into account in your comparison.
However, I've been really struggling with getting 4.0 working properly. It's getting frustrating. I don't know if it's something I'm doing wrong, or is a hosting issue. I hope to get it figured out soon or I'm going to contract out some WP developers.
So I've got a handful of WP 2.x installs I run for some friends, and a personal WPmu that I run for myself. With the intentions of moving everyone else over to the multiuser install so I only have one thing to have to manage, update, etc. That's why the MT4 promise of managing multiple blogs from one install sounds great.
But at face value, I'm sort of disappointed at the number of MT4 templates (themes?). Ideally I'd be able to find comparable ones to what I've got for WP already, but it looks like I've got to find an alternative.
MT4 really doesn't have RSS feeds for comments?
MT4 really doesn't have a way to password protect individual posts? I have some bloggers that use this feature quite a bit.
I'm still gonna poke around things a bit, maybe try and post my personal WP blog over to MT4 and see what it looks like. And now that the newest WP2.3 seems to have ruffled some feathers....but I dunno...WP has been a breeze and a dream. I just need a good way to manage multiple blogs, and WPmu is a pain!
Thanks
- Polished admin GUI (however, bells and whizzles don't make up for the drop down issues and the fact that extended core functionality makes clutter)
- Multiple blog handling
- Easy and VERY attractive 'get-template-by-url' feature (cannot remember exact name). Unfortunately, howeverbuggy in my experience so far. particularly when trying to add as a repository from http://www.thestylearchive.com/ - seems like the CSS files transfer allright, but the pics are left behind - refreshing/republishing doesn't help)
If the template issues got resolved along with the license clarity - MT4 would seem very promising - however it need more testing on my part...
I thought I was going to chuck my computer through the glass door when I kept republishing and nothing was happening (The page kept loading from the cache). So far I have had to republish the site for every little thing because the partial publishings aren't clear to me what they cover. And what are assets and how do they differ from widgets? No explanation and no link on where to find them. I go to the widgets page and there are check boxes and the only option given is to delete them. My hacker boyfriend seems to like the guts of MT better but so far the GUI is not user friendly. I'm looking forward to learning Movable Type but I worry it will be an uphill battle.
On WordPress, post data are stored in the database. On MT, post data is stored in an HTML file (which makes the database have little use).
On WordPress, post data are stored in the database. On MT, post data is stored in an HTML file (which makes the database have little use).