Category: 
April 4, 2008
I recently went through a stage of investigating Movable Type for a company vs Word Press. I have used and been a big fan of Word Press for a good few years now, so I wasn’t really familiar with MT.
First impressions of Movable Type were quite favorable. I installed it and started tinkering around with it. Simple to use with a nice looking admin (something that old Word Press was lacking). Easy to click and change templates. Lots of cute little Ajaxy stuff going on.
But then I started to delve a little deeper. I wanted to change the templates. And that is where the trouble set in.
Ugh. Turned out to be a giant pain in the ass. What I expected was the ability to edit the templates in an editor and FTP them up or straight edit with Vi (nerdy). It appears that Movable Type doesn’t actually work like this. It turns out that MT actually has a set of templates, but then builds your site into static html based on the templates. Meaning that if you edit a set of templates (which happen to be stored in the database) you have to rebuild your site.
Basically you can’t edit your templates without using their web based editor which then saves your changes into the database. LAME with a capital L.
Thus ending my experiment with Movable Type and setting me squarely back in the Word Press camp. Not that I ever strayed that far.
And now with Word Press 2.5 I am an even happier camper. The administrative interface is rocking my little nerd world.
Long live Word Press and open source! Yatta!
Horaayy..there are 3 comment(s) for me so far ;)
I love the fact that there are so many cool plugins available for Wordpress.
And the back-end admin GUI for the new Wordpress 2.5 rocks.
MT is open source.
But on the template side, Movable Type has supporting mapping templates to files for years. You can set each database-backed template to map to a file on disk, and MT will use the newer of the two when republishing.
This is handy if you have a dev stack and a production stack, using Subversion—or your VCS of choice—to push updates to the live site.
FWIW, I never use the web interface to edit templates.
I DO like 2.5, but the sidebar management is REALLY cumbersome. I also don’t know the custom fields value yet. I’ll figure it out. I too was tempted to look at mt and walked away as quickly.