I am in the middle of building or tweaking a few different Movable Type and Wordpress sites, including one for a friend who is now a client.
He sent me an email yesterday, asking me to weigh in on the following blog post. I had been meaning to weigh in on MT vs. WP for some time, and I actually wrote my take on things before I even read the post. After reading the post, I felt that my take could stand as is, so here's my reply:
I've always thought Anil Dash (who commented in the post you sent, FYI) made some great points in this piece:
http://www.movabletype.com/blog/2008/03/a-wordpress-25-upgrade-guide.html
Through my experience, I've noticed several advantages that Movable Type has over Wordpress. I'll list the ones I feel are most relevant to your site/needs:
INTERNAL PUBLISHING OF PAGES VS. DYNAMIC PHP:
This is the core difference between MT and WP. Wordpress is designed so that you design internal templates that are used to dynamically generate "pages" when you visit a URL for a Wordpress site. This means that there are no actual "pages" that are "published" in the traditional sense. One of the dangers of this is that if you are not very very fluent in PHP, you can inadvertently break your entire site with a small piece of bad code, and not even know it right away.
Conversely, with Movable Type, it's Perl-based publishing system generates actual pages that are stored on your file server. During that publishing process, if you use improper MT code, it often does a tremendous job of preventing you from publishing content until the conflict is resolved.
For example, let's say you have some code that starts with <mt:Entries> and instead of putting in the proper </mt:Entries> tag, you forget the slash. Movable Type will highlight this conflict and tell you what template and what line the error occurs in, thus helping you to resolve the conflict.
In Wordpress, by contrast if you have a similar error, every page that uses that template will display an ugly PHP error.
Sometimes these errors are obvious and easy to fix, but sometimes, you don't know right away, and if you were to make such a mistake on, say, a Friday afternoon, it might be several days before the site gets fixed.
He sent me an email yesterday, asking me to weigh in on the following blog post. I had been meaning to weigh in on MT vs. WP for some time, and I actually wrote my take on things before I even read the post. After reading the post, I felt that my take could stand as is, so here's my reply:
I've always thought Anil Dash (who commented in the post you sent, FYI) made some great points in this piece:
http://www.movabletype.com/blog/2008/03/a-wordpress-25-upgrade-guide.html
Through my experience, I've noticed several advantages that Movable Type has over Wordpress. I'll list the ones I feel are most relevant to your site/needs:
INTERNAL PUBLISHING OF PAGES VS. DYNAMIC PHP:
This is the core difference between MT and WP. Wordpress is designed so that you design internal templates that are used to dynamically generate "pages" when you visit a URL for a Wordpress site. This means that there are no actual "pages" that are "published" in the traditional sense. One of the dangers of this is that if you are not very very fluent in PHP, you can inadvertently break your entire site with a small piece of bad code, and not even know it right away.
Conversely, with Movable Type, it's Perl-based publishing system generates actual pages that are stored on your file server. During that publishing process, if you use improper MT code, it often does a tremendous job of preventing you from publishing content until the conflict is resolved.
For example, let's say you have some code that starts with <mt:Entries> and instead of putting in the proper </mt:Entries> tag, you forget the slash. Movable Type will highlight this conflict and tell you what template and what line the error occurs in, thus helping you to resolve the conflict.
In Wordpress, by contrast if you have a similar error, every page that uses that template will display an ugly PHP error.
Sometimes these errors are obvious and easy to fix, but sometimes, you don't know right away, and if you were to make such a mistake on, say, a Friday afternoon, it might be several days before the site gets fixed.
Continue reading My take on the Movable Type vs. Wordpress debate.
