14 April 2010

 

Movable Type vs. WordPress, Round 2

A bit more blogging platform geekiness, but much shorter this time.

Contrary to my first impressions a couple of days ago, I'm warming to the way Movable Type works. It's taken only a little effort to customize it, roughly to match my existing page design and typography here—easier than I've experienced with WordPress.

So, two days later, it looks light I might end up using Movable Type 5 after all. But we'll see if my further experiments blow it up in some nasty way.

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# 9:49 PM

Comments:

I can't wait to get the full details. ;-)
# posted by Anonymous Lloyd Budd : 15 April, 2010 09:28
 
One reason I'm headed that way now is that it's worthwhile for me to understand another blog platform, since I've gotten pretty familiar with WordPress in the past four years. (And Drupal's more complicated than I want to get into!)

Conversely, the last version of Movable Type that I worked with was 2.6, from 2003 (before WordPress even existed), and needless to say, things have changed a little since then.

I'll definitely give you the lowdown if anything blows up, Lloyd, and fortunately I also have a good idea of how I'd switch over to WordPress/Really Static quickly if things don't work out on the MT side.
# posted by Blogger Derek : 15 April, 2010 11:57
 
It's also worth noting what John Gruber (whose Daring Fireball blog runs on Movable Type) wrote about this whole debate a few years ago.
# posted by Blogger Derek : 16 April, 2010 10:22
 
Did you give up on flat files (no db) ? :)
Here is my current comparison chart, I didn't choose yet either … None is great.
# posted by Blogger jesus2099 : 18 April, 2010 11:33
 
None of the flat file systems really appealed to me when I looked. Movable Type 5 looks to meet my needs for now. But I can always change later!
# posted by Blogger Derek : 18 April, 2010 12:12
 
Thanks for the details, Derek. I had pretty much arrived at the same place (MovableType), with a need to support several commercial sites (e.g. https://www.ikonarts.com/) but skeptical of database-driven platforms.

I'm migrating my first site this afternoon - fingers crossed :)
# posted by Blogger Matthew Skelton : 25 April, 2010 05:48
 
Have you made any final decision Derek? I enjoyed reading your posts as I've procrastinated significantly on the Blogger FTP situation.
# posted by Blogger Jacob Dante Leffler : 28 April, 2010 08:56
 
It's Movable Type 5. I have the new system installed, tweaked, and ready to go, and I'll be changing over May 1. In the meantime I'm going through my current Blogger posts and turning off new comments, since there will be no way to publish them here to the site once the FTP service shuts down that day.
# posted by Blogger Derek : 28 April, 2010 09:19