6/7 Does anyone use (or have familiarity with) WordPress as
blogging software? What are its dis/advantages compared to
Movable Type? Thanks.
\_ It's been a year or two since I did an involved comparison of the
two so this may be somewhat dated, YMMV, not responsible if this
advice causes your CPU to catch fire, kills babies, etc... Last I
looked at them, WP wasn't quite there yet vs. MT. This was shortly
after the genesis of WP (prior to that it was a package called
Cafelog IIRC). From what I understand, WP has been making leaps
and bounds and, at this point, it is likely on par or superior to
MT. Older versions of MT were written entirely in Perl. WP is and
always has been written in PHP. Modern MT is a mix of Perl and
PHP. As I understand it, this was done as a way to work around the
fact that, in older versions of MT, you had to manually rebuild
your pages regularly, which was annoying, to say the least. IMO,
the MT plugins community is a little more mature than that of WP.
These days, the main deciding factor I care about is licensing.
Although MT is free for personal use, it quickly gets expensive for
any sort of commercial or contract work. I think this is because
SixApart (makers of MT) would prefer that people use TypePad, their
hosted subscription-based service. My main beef with MT's
licensing is that they absolutely forbid you from distributing
modified versions of the MT source. So, in essence, if you write
any plugins, fix any bugs, or develop any enhancements for MT, you
are at the mercy of SixApart. Sure you could distribute them
separately or as patches, but I don't particularly expect bloggers
to be the sort of users that are willing to deal with tools like
diff and patch (nor do I think they should have to). Consequently,
I am inclined to avoid MT since I have little interest in doing
what amounts to free development work for SixApart. WP, on the
other hand, is licensed under the GPL so you can hack on it to your
hearts content, though any changes or enhancements you release must
also be licensed under the GPL. Feel free to email me if you have
more specific questions. -dans |