General

Movable Type vs. Wordpress

SixApart, publishers of Movable Type, finally sensing they might be in some trouble, realized they need to Do Something(TM) and have promised to abandon the free/paid model and go open source.

This is of course three years too late. As Carthik (one of the Wordpress coders) said:

I still clearly remember the day Mena announced the new pricing structure for MovableType. A day later, I wrote up a post on how to move from Movable Type to WordPress. Then, the exodus began - with famous users, like Mark Pilgrim, Molly, and so many others shifting to WordPress. Those were busy days on the #wordpress IRC channel. The number of opinion-leading bloggers who used MT started declining, and most of the new bloggers who came after chose WordPress. While there is no reliable count of the number of WordPress Vs. Movable Type users, I dare say more folks use WordPress than MT.

I remember the day clearly as well. NixGuy was not up yet and I had only one small family blog. The problem was that SixApart’s free model said you could have one poster and up to three blogs free, no problem. Well that was a problem because I had one blog but two posters, my wife and I.

I wasn’t about to shell out $99 for this stupid hobby when there was plenty of other blog software out there. So I started surfing and immediately all signs pointed to Wordpress. I was impressed at the first look. The install was painless, the Admin interface was amazing, and the conversion from MT was flawless. Never looked back.

What’s more, I’ve directly influenced at least ten bloggers that I know of to move to Wordpress as well. And who knows how many bloggers they’ve influenced.

So the question becomes, how much did the move to the paid model really cost SixApart. The answer is a lot and they’ve finally realized it. But the insanity doesn’t stop there. Take a look at the feature list for MT4 (not out yet):

• A completely reinvented user interface with a dashboard overview of how all of your blogs are doing.

Hey! a dashboard. Kind of like Wordpress has!

• Support for publishing standalone pages and managing file assets and images right within MT

Something Wordpress has had since 1.2 at least.

• Brand-new community features like OpenID, and a built-in user registration system

Wordpress has always had user registration if you wanted it.

• A completely redesigned component architecture that makes MT faster and more scalable than ever before.

Translation: We’re much slower than wordpress, but we’re going to try to fix that.

• And it’s going to be available in a completely open source version with its home at a completely relaunched community site that revives an old, beloved URL: movabletype.org.

Kind of like Wordpress.org which has been fully GPL since the beginning.

Which makes you wonder what the heck they’ve been doing for the last three years. But that’s not all! Let’s take a look at the SixApart management page. We have 11 (eleven!) highly paid senior managers to manage blogging software (blogging software!) that has steadily fallen behind in features for the last three years.

Apparently this is what VC money can do for you. This is also what is known in the tech circles as a “sell” signal. Cash the checks while the money is flowing but have an escape route planned.

Lots of similar thoughts around the blogosphere. InsideTonic has a good take on the feature comparison:

Both applications store all your entries on a database via a web server. Traditionally, MT would only allow you to work with static pages, meaning everything had to be rebuilt wherever it was published, whereas WP allowed bloggers to handle content dynamically, making it much quicker to publish posts. Movable Type has improved greatly in this area recently and can now ably deal with dynamic data, generating and publishing pages on the fly via SQL queries.

Sooner or later someone will come along and tell you that storing everything in a database is wrong because it means you’re blog won’t scale. Guess what, you’re blog doesn’t need to scale because it’s highly unlikely that you will get to thousands of hits a day. And when you do, just install a caching engine in front. No Big Deal. In the meantime it’s nice to have an administrative interface that is quick and responsive and won’t eat your posts. We bloggers appreciate that. This is also why blogger/blogspot sucks.

Another reason why people started switching to WordPress was that it was much easier for a regular Joe to pick up and start fiddling with straight away. There are much more pre-made themes and page templates available in WP, and the installation process is pretty painless compared with the long-drawn out procedure associated with Movable Type. However, Six Apart have kindly bundled a lot of new, high-quality themes and templates with version 4.

Wordpress was prettier out of the box. That did make a difference. And the theme engine was cake too.

Virgin bloggers have always warmed to the WYSWYG approach adopted by WordPress, which allowed users without much scripting knowledge to achieve decent-looking, accessible results. After watching this new digital generation fawn over these visual tools, the Movable Type guys have made MT4 much more user-friendly. A decent web editor offers functionality to allow insertion of not just text, but audio, photos, and files too. You can also easily reuse any of those rich media assets, with MT4’s new built-in asset management system.

The user interface blew me away, I could link to something in less than 2 seconds. bold, highlight, blockquote all with button clicks. It now seems second nature, but three years ago, no one had it.

Technosailor hilariously compares MT to Bilbo Baggins. One excerpt:

Despite adventures, it is still old and worn out. Yes, even though Movable Type has ventured outside of the shire, climbed mountains, ran through forests, rode on the backs of eagles and wielded an Elven sword against a ravenous beast spider, in the end it is still written on Perl and includes much of the difficulty in implementing that its predecessors have had. Fortunately, the Berkeley DB system is no longer supported so hats off for that.

Ugh. Perl. So it’s outdated and impossible to maintain as a codebase. Nice.

I’ll end with this from Mark Evans, which nicely sums things up:

The question is how MT lost its first-mover/early-mover advantage? In the tech world, all you need is one small, but crucial, mistake to find yourself going from the penthouse to the outhouse. In MT’s case, it was the decision to introduce a paid-version in 2004 that caused a revolt among its large and loyal user-based. People who had enthusiastically wave the MT flag started looking for another option - and Wordpress became the platform choice for the in crowd. You could argue Apple’s became #2 the day it made one strategic decision: to keep the Mac OS in-house rather than licensing it to other computer makers. One decision, big consequences.

© 2007 NixGuy.com.