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Less filling, tastes great.. or Movable Type against WordPress

Less filling, tastes great.. or Movable Type against WordPress

Mike Rundle takes a deeper look at Movable Type v. WordPress in a great post over at Business Logs. He digs into the positives and negatives of both Movable Type and WordPress – both of which are fine pieces of blogging software.

I find myself concurring with Mike on most of his points – except to point out that I wouldn’t call PHP future-proofed and Movable Type’s use of Perl a negative. And this is coming from a guy like me who loves PHP…

Properly configured, Perl is an outstanding choice for the backend of any dynamic web application. Back in the day when I was a far more serious coder than I am today, a buddy of mine and I coded up an entire dating system for our university’s intranet in a long caffeine fueled weekend using Perl. It was fast, dirty, used flat tables, and got the job done. To the end user, they could not have seen the difference between something generated in Perl, something generated in PHP, or something generated in some other scripting system – such as they were back in 1994.

My biggest personal gripe with WordPress is something that Mike cites as a positive – and that’s its dynamic publishing capability. Yes, it’s highly flexible when you want to change something in the design, use a new plugin, and so on. But for high volume, high traffic sites, such as Blog Herald, this constant strain on the SQL server can be a pain. At least some static capability would be a godsend.

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We use both Movable Type (for sites like Blog Network Watch, for example) and WordPress (for this site) and like both. Were I launching a new blog today, I would likely use WordPress simply because I find more options and active development going on in the WordPress community. And, to Mike’s point, many of the most creative folks in that community are active in 9rules.

In my mind, Six Apart has some catching up to do.

View Comments (3)
  • My biggest personal gripe with WordPress is something that Mike cites as a positive – and that’s its dynamic publishing capability.

    There is nothing wrong with dynamic publishing per se, and I see the performance issue is mostly WordPress related. True, 2.0 has a SQL query caching. However from what I have observed WP is wasting a lot of CPU cycles generating the same content again and again, and they are not necessarily database-bounded.

    Take content filtering plugins for example — not just Matt’s Texturize but many people installed half a dozen of other filters to replace tags/comments in their entry with something else. Usually a Perl-compatible regular expression is executed, and they are very heavy on CPU and memory. The result is not even cached (unless you use a per-URI cache like WP-Cache2)!! TextPattern caches Textile-filtered content on per-entry basis — not sure why WP can’t do it.

    After all, with appropriate caching, it is possible to achieve near-static performance on a dynamic publishing site. SixApart is trying to do the other way around, and so far it doesn’t seem to work that well.

  • I’ve been using both and as a ontent person rather than a coder I’d note that installing plugins on MT is a nightmare vs WordPress. Plus WordPress has neat features such as subscribing to comments. Saying that MT is a very robust packahge and can be great as a content management system beyong blogging.

  • I’ve used both WordPress and MovableType. These days I’m using Thingamablog. It doesn’t use MySQL and I can upload it from my PC to my domain using FTP. Today I just finished uploading all my content. I still need to re-do the template.

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