I have spent the last week fooling around with WordPress 2.3 and Movable Type 4.01 and have been very impressed with the advancements on both platforms.
I come from a background of all blogging software, but recent years have found me tooling around in pMachine and Expression Engine. Many moons ago I first started playing around with the idea of a blog by handrolling HTML (this was the mid 90s), used FrontPage, graduated to GreyMatter, ran
Movable Type for 3 years, and then found Ellis and company's
pMachine. I have not played with
WordPress since 1.5, and it was really to evaluate the platform.
The Andyverse has been run on
Expression Engine since that software's release, but recently found some of the functionality lacking for personal blogging. I was running into spam problems and just simple user authentication, so I wanted to move to a smaller option (free works great too).
The goal was to view the playing field once more of options, and it mainly looked like the self-hosted software category had only two other entrants: Movable Type and WordPress. I of course started with Movable Type, it still having a loving place in my heart, and I really like what I see.
As do others...
But
this Google Trends graph shows the magic is not in action. What happened to the world-wide support for Movable Type? Japan seems the only bastion of loyalty now, and the problem is likely attributed to the infamous v3 release with required payment for anything more than the most basic version of Movable Type. Of course this also happened to coincide with the release of WordPress, a famous '5 minute install,' and notable luminaries in the blogsphere exclaiming their love for open-source and free-as-in-beer philosophy.
If we go back to
the article posted at Plasticmind, out-of-box functionality in Movable Type 4 exceeds WordPress 2.3. Even the concerns over paid versions have been trounced, as MT4 is now free-as-in-beer, and a recently announced GPL open-source version will be available without any restrictions in the later part of 2007.
So why the lack of love?
Sex appeal.
WordPress is using all the right bits to make people think it is a slicker application for writing down your thoughts on the web, even if its functionality is more limiting. They have also engaged the community by encouraging development without having to strain themselves. And Automattic has relied on third parties to provide core functionality to the product without having to stretch themselves too thin. By comparison Six Apart has over 100 employees and still took 2 years to roll out a new 4mb blog software package.
This war is being fought with sex appeal, and WordPress seems to have all the right moves. Especially since I can make it do whatever any other package can with extensive plugin support; it just might take a weekend longer than I assumed...
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