The Why of WP
Mar 14th, 2008 by pyra
Every so often, I get asked why I chose WordPress (and in this case, WordPress MU) for blogs.ai-ls.com .
There are other options out there.
The why is easy. I was trying to integrate the blogs into the already existing forums.
There were basically 2 choices, WordPress, and The Blog Mog. If you’ve used the FF Wiki, you know what the blog mod is like. Eventually, I just decided that the PHP Nuke was getting too overloaded and started from scratch. I like the results.
It is what it is, but it lacks a lot of features that are awesome — such as having your own url (in the case of this site, it would be something like www.ai-ls.com/modules/forums/blogs.php?blog=1234). I guess you could book mark it, but it loses some of the appeal of a simple URL, such as blogs.ai-ls.com/pyra .
Well, this past week there has been a small battle in the ongoing fight of WordPress vs. Movable Type.
It all started with this post in the MT blog — http://www.movabletype.com/blog/2008/03/a-wordpress-25-upgrade-guide.html , which was quickly followed up in one of their dev’s blogs http://sippey.typepad.com/filtered/2008/03/were-here-to-co.html , which was followed up in ma.tt (one of the primary authors of WordPress) http://ma.tt/2008/03/wordpress-is-open-source/ . All links have been removed b/c I don’t feel like getting drawn into this mess.
However, in the interest of fairness, I decided to test out Movable Type. I set up mt.blogs.ai-ls.com/pyra as a temporary MT test site. I will make posts to both blogs to really try to understand how MT works.
Installation was not hard. There were a handful of extra steps beyond what WordPress MU/WordPress require, but nothing more than expected. It was painless, with the only troubles being a typo I made with the MySQL DB name.
Then came some challenges.
First off, I chose as my name “Pyra’s Testing Place”, because this is “Pyra’s Party Place”. I wanted the URL to be the same, so I changed it to just /pyra. However, MT uses generated HTML for everything, instead of dynamic PHP (like WP), and it installed everything to /pyras_testing_place . I’m also not used to having to hit publish and waiting more than about 10 seconds for the new post to show up.
But its a different program, I shouldn’t expect Mac OS X to work exactly like Windows just because all I’ve used is Windows.
If you visit the sites listed above, you will see both sides telling you why their product is better.
As far as I can tell, they are basically the same. MT gives you more options, WP makes some things easier. Personally, from an admin point of view, giving the users less options is a good thing. I really don’t want 99% of the visitors choosing their own upload path, then asking me why nothing works. Maiev I know would know what he’s doing, but many others? Probably not.
All of the advantages of MT (OpenID, can handle huge load, etc) don’t really apply. No one uses OpenID (aside from LiveJournal), and with akismet + open comments, anyone who wants to can just post with the now common format of “CharacterName of Server” or “CharacterName (Server)”. As to huge loads? This site gets maybe 1000 hits per day, so honestly, who cares. Oh noes, my pages loaded in .89 seconds instead of .72 seconds. It doesn’t matter. MT makes extensive use of the file system, while WP uses .htaccess and ModRewrite. MT includes a handful of items as standard that WP requires a plugin for (for example, the stats, and any MT install can be turned into a multi-user install).
But MT does some dumb things too, like not creating a blog at the install root by default, even on a multi-user install.
Since both products are basically even, and I’m already running on WordPress MU, I see no reason to change. I’m sure if I were running MT I would say the same thing.
For the time being, the MT site will remain up. I can’t figure out how to enable user-created accounts, so send me a message if you want to test it out.
This is my stance. If anyone really wants their own MT install, it can be arranged. As can <charactername>.ai-ls.com if you really want. Otherwise, as far as I’m concerned, WPMU is how this blog site will stay. For what this site is, I feel it is the better choice.
-pyra
Edit: Bleh, looks like MT doesn’t work with Windows Live Writer, which is what I use for all of my posts anymore. That… just… sucks.
Edit 2: Jim Ramsey (lead designer for Movable Type) posted a link in my comments on how to make the Live Writer work w/ MT. I take back edit 1, it does work.
Hi Pyra. I’m Jim Ramsey, the lead designer for Movable Type. Thanks for giving MT a try. I just wanted to address a few of the problems you had with setting up your blog. You can install your MT blog at to any url, but when you change the name of your blog, the site url is automatically updated to reflect the blog name. Just make sure you change the site url after you’ve finished changing the name of your blog to make sure it gets installed exactly where you want. As for OpenID, it’s is supported by Yahoo and AOL in addition to LiveJournal and other smaller services.
Also, I believe that MT does work with Windows Live Writer, but it’s probably not as intuitive as it could be. Hopefully this will help:
http://www.alexlomas.com/blog/2006/08/live_writer.html
If you have other quetsions, I’d be happy to help.
Wow, I didn’t expect to get noticed.
Hello Jim. Thank you for the link, I didn’t know about the alternate password, nor even how to find it. I was able to get the Live Writer working w/ MT after I found the info.
After using it for a little bit, I don’t find MT to be too bad, although I admit that knowing how to do one thing in WP leads me to try to find the same in the other. I’m not sure, but I think that if I had not started with WP, I would have trouble using MT. My comment earlier about not expecting Mac OS X to be like Windows still holds true, I cannot expect MT to be just another WP clone, but WP is the only thing I’ve used, and so anything I do in MT will be based on anything I know of WP. However, if I ever have a personal blog, I will have to evaluate MT vs WP. The latest version does offer much. I’m going to keep testing it out over the next couple of weeks. My web host — DreamHost — offers 1-click installs for WordPress, as well as 1-click updates, which is fairly huge for me. They don’t offer this for WPMU, but for the single user WP, it means I don’t have to worry about keeping the software up to date, anytime there is a release, I can update it within about 10 hours (and can do this from any web browser, even from work).
With that said, both products have room for improvement. For one, I would like the multi-user MT to be able to go into dumb mode, and not allow me to set a base for my install that is different from my URL. On this site, because WPMU takes away certain choices, those who use do not have to know much about what’s behind the scenes. For the average user, I believe they like when the software gets out of the way and handles certain things for you.
As for OpenID, I’m still a bit mixed on what I feel about it. In general, I don’t trust people I don’t know well, especially on the internet. While I can be reasonably assured that LiveJournal is trustworthy, a random OpenID server may or may not be. Aside from a couple of those who are trusted, I’m not sure what I gain for a site like this, where 90% of those commenting know each other. This is (for the most part) a blog for people who play the MMORPG FFXI (Final Fantasy XI). But, as the admin for it, I do post about running the software too. On a larger blog with tons of readers and posters, I can see an advantage to OpenID. The FFXI blog community is small, most of whom can be found at this link http://staronion.com/maiev/nfblog/?page_id=340 . Other than those who use livejournal, blogger, and wordpress.com, the ones who host their own blogs are mostly WordPress, or WPMU.
I don’t regret making the choice to go with WPMU a year ago. It was the right choice then. Had I gone with MT, I’m sure I would be just as happy today about the decision. At the time, WPMU was a good choice. As someone who had never really tried to blog before, it was not a bad learning curve.
But once again, I want to thank you for taking the time to comment on such a small blog. I think that says a lot right there.