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.
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.
