29
Mar
07

MovableType vs WordPress

By Joshua Steimle 8 Comments Categories: Reviews & How-To

I started my first blog, this one, with MovableType. To be honest it was kind of a pain to learn all the ins and outs of how to customize MT and get it to work the way I wanted, but once I learned, it was easy to set up other blogs on the same platform. Although techie people, as I consider myself to be in at least some sense, are supposed to be open to trying new technologies, I was loathe to try any other blogging platform. I thought MT was the most powerful, flexible, and user-friendly. Until I tried WordPress.


Now that I’ve seriously tried WordPress I have to admit I think I like it more for a few simple reasons.

1. Preview. It’s easy for me to preview what my published post is going to look like. MT gives me a preview, but it’s only a semi-preview in that it doesn’t show the post to me within the interface of my site, I can’t look at it while I’m working on the post, and frankly, the MT preview might as well not be a preview at all.

2. No rebuild. With WP you change something, save it, and that’s it. With MT sometimes a change means you have to “rebuild” the site, or at least a page. But I frequently have to rebuild the entire site, which takes some time. I didn’t think it was that big of a deal until I used WP and realized how nice it is to not have to rebuild anything.

3. Formatting. MT requires you to use buttons to make things bold, italics, links, etc. WP is more like Word in that you can use keystrokes like Ctrl-B, Ctrl-I, etc., and I’m a keystroke junkie.

4. General ease of use. There are other things I’m forgetting, but overall my experience with WP is that it’s a little easier, a little more user friendly, and when you’re posting several times per week that means it’s a little nicer. Nice enough that all my future blogs will be on WP, not so nice that I’m going to go through the pain of converting my MT blogs to WP.

If you’re thinking of starting a new blog, I would recommend WP. And I’m sure others could chime in with 100 other reasons they like WP. What I’d really like to hear is if anyone can give me a reason why they think MT is better.

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  • Doug Bradshaw

    WordPress works for posting mathematics: you can import LaTeX.

  • http://smoothharold.com Blake Snow

    WordPress for the win (though I still use blogger on my personal blog for speed purposes).

  • http://www.richardkmiller.com Richard K Miller

    One of the best things about WordPress is the plugins, which can add tons of additional functionality to your blog.

    The plugins on my WordPress blogs prevent spam (Akismet does an awesome job), greet new users with a separate welcome message, route my RSS feed through FeedBurner, provide caching, provide image lightboxing, offer a contact form, etc.

  • http://www.phil801.com/wpblog Phil801

    I totally love WordPress. RKM just mentioned several of my favorite plugins, but I also love the google analytics/feedburner reports plugin and the more recent plugin, twittertools.

    I’ve tried MT and I agree with you Josh, it’s a PITA. I totally dislike blogger and i don’t like MS Live. Those are the only platforms I’ve tried and WP smokes them all.

  • http://voxpopdesign.com/bloomburst Matthew Reinbold

    I have to agree with the above conclusions – I’ve tried several blog platforms but WordPress is what I’m standardizing on (even wrote the scripts necessary to transform a PHPBB form to a WordPress setup because I feel that strongly about it).

    I’m such a fan because you’re not left high and dry once your blog is up and running – there’s an entire community of plugin authors, theme designers, help wiki editors, etc. that are contributing to make it better. If it were just the software it would be one thing. But combining it with an incredible community is something else entirely.

  • http://www.russpage.net Russell

    I’ve always wondered what people thought was better. The backend of my wordpress blog says “Akismet has caught 38,449 spam for you since you first installed it.”

    How ’bout them apples.

    I also use:
    Notable – automatically plugs Digg/del.icio.us buttons at the bottom of each post.
    google sitemaps – automatic sitemap generator

  • http://www.mwi.com Joshua Steimle

    You can set up Akismet and Google sitemaps for MT, although it’s not as easy as with WP. WP does it with the click of a button, whereas doing it on MT requires at least a minimal level of technical skill, but that’s enough to make it difficult for most people.

  • http://neude.net Ryan Elkins

    I’m new to blogging and went with WP. It’s been very easy and I haven’t had any problems with it. I would definitely say I’m happy with it. I can’t really think of anything off the top of my head that I’ve found myself wishing it would do.