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.
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NO DEV SERVER, NO PROBLEM!
Many organizations with a web site do not (either by choice or for budget reasons) have an active development server where new designs, and content additions can be published to before incorporating into the main web site. With Movable Type's ability to create entirely separate blogs from a single installation, you can clone your existing site into a new directory, make changes to style sheets, modules etc. publish them, and then easily add those changes to your main blog.
While performing similar tasks in Wordpress is technically possible, it is much more difficult because of Wordpress' reliance on virtual pages and .htaccess redirects.
USING MULTIPLE BLOGS TO FEED ONE MAIN SITE
As we are demonstrating with your site, we can create multiple blogs that server vastly different purposes and have different requirements of the admin area with custom fields that are vital for one blog, but irrelevant or distracting in other blogs. Movable Type makes this possible and easier to manage through it's ability to allow a site administrator to treat separate blogs as sort of an uber-category structure. In addition, the system also allows you to pull specific pieces of data from one blog into another. This can prove especially useful/effective when trying to create sidebar items, or when you want to create a specific blog that has the sole purpose of generating email newsletters.
FINAL VERDICT: IT DEPENDS
While I am a big fan of Movable Type and have used it for many clients (grandview.rymatech.com, susanmernit.com, gamedaymagazine.com and others), I have also used Wordpress to build a few sites for clients (Aspenhillcc.org, TravelingGeeks.com, WeMedia.com and others). I understand the desire some people have for being able to use the numerous plugins and themes Wordpress has to offer. From my personal experience, I find when a site has a fairly straightforward focus that requires the system it is using to behave more like a traditional blog, you're pretty safe with Wordpress. However, if you want to pull your site in many different directions and want to avoid those different directions from jeopardizing the publishing of different areas, Movable Type can help you to avoid some headaches.
Many organizations with a web site do not (either by choice or for budget reasons) have an active development server where new designs, and content additions can be published to before incorporating into the main web site. With Movable Type's ability to create entirely separate blogs from a single installation, you can clone your existing site into a new directory, make changes to style sheets, modules etc. publish them, and then easily add those changes to your main blog.
While performing similar tasks in Wordpress is technically possible, it is much more difficult because of Wordpress' reliance on virtual pages and .htaccess redirects.
USING MULTIPLE BLOGS TO FEED ONE MAIN SITE
As we are demonstrating with your site, we can create multiple blogs that server vastly different purposes and have different requirements of the admin area with custom fields that are vital for one blog, but irrelevant or distracting in other blogs. Movable Type makes this possible and easier to manage through it's ability to allow a site administrator to treat separate blogs as sort of an uber-category structure. In addition, the system also allows you to pull specific pieces of data from one blog into another. This can prove especially useful/effective when trying to create sidebar items, or when you want to create a specific blog that has the sole purpose of generating email newsletters.
FINAL VERDICT: IT DEPENDS
While I am a big fan of Movable Type and have used it for many clients (grandview.rymatech.com, susanmernit.com, gamedaymagazine.com and others), I have also used Wordpress to build a few sites for clients (Aspenhillcc.org, TravelingGeeks.com, WeMedia.com and others). I understand the desire some people have for being able to use the numerous plugins and themes Wordpress has to offer. From my personal experience, I find when a site has a fairly straightforward focus that requires the system it is using to behave more like a traditional blog, you're pretty safe with Wordpress. However, if you want to pull your site in many different directions and want to avoid those different directions from jeopardizing the publishing of different areas, Movable Type can help you to avoid some headaches.
