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.
