MovableType is the Windows of the Personal Publishing World
Everyone is all a-twitter that MT 3.0 is about to come out of hiding. Am I biased because I use a different publishing system? Probably.
But I maintain that MT has gotten to the top of the heap because of it's wide adoption. Much like Windows. Many people agree that OS X or even Linux is a technically superior operating system, but it's still Windows with the lion's share of the market. Much like MT.
So, herewith, a list of things that I don't like about MT.
These are in no particular order. I've used MT (kicking and screaming), but am by no means proficient. These are my opinions, so you can disagree with them. Feel free to comment or otherwise let me know if I get something factually wrong. And yes, I am talking about a default install.
- Runs on Perl
Perl is great for many things. It was used to build many of the first web applications. I still have many fond memories of CGI.pm. Today, the CGI directory lock-down, the necessity for manually installing extra libraries, and the eclipse of Perl by other languages (notably PHP and Python) make it a pain to work with. Yes, this can and will cause a "my programming language is better" flame war.
- Anchor-based permalinks
Also known as "individual pages for posts turned off by default". There are many Search Engine Voodoo reasons why this is a bad thing. A big long page with lots of categorically-unrelated posts is not that great to link to. With comments on a separate page (see below), it keeps even more related content on a separate page. Radio is guilty of this as well.
- Static pages
Basically, MT has you create an entry, then "publishes" it, turning it into a static HTML page. The downside of this is two-fold:
- Hard to include dynamic content
- Increasing server load as content and/or comments increase
Yes, there are some advantages to speed for really busy sites, since static pages can always be served faster than dynamic. But, I've heard of the comment system breaking down completely under heavy load. Drupal (for instance) implements database caching of pages for anonymous users.
- Pop-up comments
Why? Why? What is the use case for having pop-up comments? It makes it harder for search engines to index, it's harder to read, and pop-ups are so 1998. Brendon does a good job with comments in MT.
- Complicated, hard to use admin and posting system
MT's backend is hard to use. I would not want to point any non-technical user at it. I find it confusing, and I consider it technical. I don't have a running install of MT kicking around anymore, otherwise I would break down its UI failings more thoroughly.
- Hard to install
This is kind of related to running on Perl, since the most common hang up seems to be around missing libraries. Still, the necessity of putting files in different places (cgi-bin vs. main html directory) just makes it harder than other systems.
- No out-of-the-box template switching
The default MT template is plain and ugly. The recent Movable Style website has a way to easily switch layouts. If someone downloaded and installed MT, is there a way to easily install a different template?
- Not free
Let's not debate free. You can't use MT commercially without paying a licensing fee. Many other systems are true open source, allowing full modification and no payment to anyone.
- Comment spam
No other system that I know of suffers from comment spam like MT does. Is it because it's the most popular system (again, like Windows)? Or is it because of failings in its technical architecture (again, like Windows)? I don't know the definitive answer, but I suspect it is a bit of both.
What systems do I like? Depends on what you want to do. In any case, ease of installation and ease of use are two primary goals that always need to be satisfied.
Wordpress is an excellent individual or blog-only application that has many standards-based features built in from the get-go. It falls down a bit with its media management, but is still the engine I recommend for people that just want a blog.
Drupal is my pick for advanced users, anyone that wants a community-based site, or as a content management system for business websites. Its base set of modules have everything included, its template system is flexible enough that you can build whatever you like, and its aggregation and feed-generating capabilities are without par.
I'm sure that MT 3 will address some of these issues. Like Windows, it may very well introduce a whole set of new ones.
Related Links:
- cyberdash
- Blog Herald
- Roland Tanglao - Roland extends my analogy to say Drupal is like Linux and Wordpress might be like the Mac
- das Netzbuch (German) - makes a further expansion: TypeKey == MSN Passport
Similar
Comments
MT has crossed the Chasm
In the past couple of months, I read two books by Geoffrey Moore - tech marketing guru.
His biggest claim to fame has been to popularize the technology adoption lifecycle.
The main idea is that different kinds of people want different kinds of things from technology. There are tech savvy early adopters, bright minded innovators, pragmatists, conservatives, and skeptics - most people falling in the pragmatist/conservative area.
The big gap (aka chasm) is between the innovators and the pragmatists. Pragmatists just want to get a job done. In the case of online publishing systems - that is publish a weblog.
Innovators are people that see the special attributes of a product, and think of the wonderful ways to use them all for good.
Movabletype has crossed the chasm. It's been accepted by practical people as suitable for doing a job.
Drupal certainly has more features, and more raw potential, however, it is still pre-chasm. The average person, wanting to put up a weblog to rant on - doesn't want to think about nodes and taxonomy. They aren't so interested in feed aggregation or federated architecture (yet).
But! It is a great plus that their uncle Charlie has installed MT too. They can always call him up, when they forget how to rebuild the personal publishing system.
There can only be one gorilla in personal publishing :D
ds
Offshore Outsourcing World
They're both just tools
I like the WordPress/Mac and Drupal/Linux comparison. But to tell the truth, it really doesn't make a difference to me which systems are perceived as friendlier or more popular or whatever. I use MovableType for some sites because MT seems to be appropriate and Drupal for others because Drupal allows me more flexibility in terms of features. But I will admit that you have to be familiar with PHP and do a good deal of modification to get Drupal to be more user friendly.
Here's some sites I did with MT and with Drupal and why:
MT:
* Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture, a small site with modest/infrequent publishing needs. Very few page fields are needed and the users already use and like MT.
Drupal:
* iaslash, a community blog with a fairly large user base requiring a solid user system, newsfeed aggregator and the ability to grow/scale as needed. This site will benefit greatly from the profile.module enhancements to come in v. 4.4, for instance.
* FamilyTravelog, a project I created to test how well Drupal could be used for creating very customized page types. Check out this review type page. Most of the chunks of the page are MySQL fields so I can do more complex stuff in the future like showing reviews by rating, etc.
What you choose should ultimately depend on the expected use of the system and the users who will be interacting with it. AIfIA chose MT, for instance, because they wanted ease of use and had a lot of people with working knowledge of MT. Drupal made sense for iaslash because it seemed best in terms of user management, feed aggregation, etc. I don't have too strong an allegiance with any camps. I use both Macs and PCs, MT and Drupal. They're all just tools in the end. I think Boris and Roland are just reporting their observations from experience so that others might get a well rounded view of their options. There's so much written about MT, but less so about WordPress and Drupal and they're providing some observations for people seeking comparisons, which is a good thing.
Some commenters seem to be pr
Some commenters seem to be pretty unhappy that I don't like MT. Remember: these are my personal observations. I welcome factual corrections, and I don't censor comments. Keep 'em coming -- I continue to learn!
I've found MT to not be the right tool for me, and I find it to have some shortcomings. In trying to understand the pros and cons of different systems, I tried to come up with an analogy. Roland did a great job of extending the analogy, saying that perhaps Drupal is the Linux of publishing systems, and just maybe Wordpress is the Mac.
Food Stamps
(Received via my contact form -- no email or name attached)
"MT has gotten to the top of the heap because of its wide adoption."
That's like saying that pizza is a popular food only because people are
always eating it, or that Napoleon was short beause of his diminutive
stature. If this is the kind of penetrating analysis you offer your
clients, I'd apply for food stamps if I were you.
The Moveable Type people produced a free, partially open-source tool
(you can't redistribute your modified code, but you can tell other
people how you modified it) that works beautifully for the most
part (although that comment spam thing is a bit of a problem) and have
done a great job of supporting, promoting, and developing it. And they
certainly haven't gone out of their way to stifle their competition:
There are umpteen open-source blogging and CMS applications out there
to choose from, none of them so far subject to hostile takeovers by the
evil Trotts, as far as I know! And you're not paying for upgrades, are
you? The way you do for Windows?
MT had an astute intuition about what kind of tool a lot of bloggers
would want and need after growing out of Blogger, and they built it,
and then they produced a moderately priced pay version, TypePad, that
capitalized on the goodwill and the loyal user community they built
with their free product, which they continue to develop and support.
Typepad is now being licensed by big ISPs to support their free
blogging services. That's what I would call a damned good business
plan.
Friendlier Creators
Boris, the no. 1 reason for MT's popularity is that it has a friendly staff which in turn created a friendlier userbase. If you compare their support board with Dupal's forum you will notice what I mean. 99.999999% of people who run MT sites or any sort of personal or small-to-medium scale site aren't tech savvy people. They expect some concise help when they ask for it. Friendly users is also why Mambo is so popular. Mambo also allows you to add meta content for the site or articles. MT also comes with multi-site and image handling support out of the box. People want to post photos and at times seperate sites/topics for personal and privacy concerns. I'd also bet that thousands of people actually like the pop-up comment boxes. Many use it by choice. The simple comment structure of MT is one reason it is a hit with joe-internet-user. Average person is easily confused with threads and threshholds.
I have used Drupal for a long time because it is released under GPL. I don't think MT's license is illegal. That whole bruhaha came about when people tried to setup their own blog hosting business using MT without paying them a fee. MT has had licensing agreements with large Japanese and American companies that offers their users blogs. I am pretty sure large corporations have better lawyers who have concluded that MT's license is enforsable in a court of law. I personally think that GPL is a bit more flexible for my own needs.
Choosing the Right Tool
From my point of view, most of the complaints above were more amusing than anything else.
Runs on Perl - Ben Trott is a Perl programmer. Why should he have to abandon his hard-won skills and knowledge for something else? And since I have no intention of working on the programming, what difference does it make to me if it is written in Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, ADA, Cobol, Fortran, or Logo? It just works.
Anchor-based permalinks - None of my weblogs use the default scheme. It was an unfortunate choice that will probably be changed in 3.0. But anyone can change to any other system whenever they like.
Static Pages - I still don't understand this argument. Why is a page that requires a massive amount of database interaction faster to load than one that is just sitting on the server?
Pop-up comments - See Anchor-based permalinks. See also Small Pages.
Complicated, hard to use admin and posting system - I installed Drupal once. After a few months, I think I had managed to change the name of the site and post a couple of simple articles. The single key to popularity of MT is the extensive and extremely well-written documentation.
Hard to install - maybe for those who fail to read the directions.
No out-of-the-box template switching - That is something I always felt could be improved. They are some sources, but nothing quite like what Alex King has put together. I do have a personal experiment, though.
Not free - Legitimate concern. That is why I am hoping that WordPress, TextPattern, Drupal, et al. will continue to improve.
Comment Spam - I would lean to the former. But, as often happens, a technological problem has a technological solution.
I guess what it comes down to is MT give me total control of what I want to do. I haven't found another system that works have as well for me. For someone else, they can make up their own mind.
p.s. And as to the "funky" feeds argument, it didn't become one until Dave decided it should be.
p.p.s. I will admit, though, this comment system works very well. Being able to make two tiny corrections and add this note is something I would love to see added when TypeKey rolls out.
where to start...
Having build sites with both, I can see the pro's of using Drupal (eg its aggregator, user management etc), but the con's far outweigh MT's issues IMO. For example:
- Drupal's templating system is rigid, confusing, & poorly documented. You can throw content around oh so much easier with MT. Hurrah for tags.
- Drupal's admin system has improved somewhat, but overall its less consistent, less logical and generally not as well designed as MT's.
- Drupal's documentation pales in comparison to MT.
- MT is rock solid compared to Drupal bug-wise, which is not an issue if you want to live on the bleeding edge and stay up to date with whats in CVS, but MT just *works*.
My main complaint is that I want tools that help me build the kind of site *I* want, not what the developers had in mind. If your purposes & those of the developers are closely aligned (eg you need a community based, slashdot-esque site) then by all means go for drupal, but for 99% of the time MT (or wordpress) are a far better fit thanks largely to their flexibility.
Don't get me wrong, Drupal does 'community' style sites very well, but "as a content management system for [a] business website"? I don't think so.
i'll be totally crass and superficial...
MT blogs consistently look better. Think that's why it's popular.
Actually, I don't think so --
Actually, I don't think so -- the default MT template is butt-ugly. Widely read blogs are unlikely to remain with the default template -- since MT has the highest installed base, it stands to reason that more of the nice-looking blogs you see will be running MT.
Wordpress recently had a style competition. I really like Rubric. At the end of the day, every good personal publishing system supports enough of a separation of content from presentation that you can
The fact that my Drupal installation doesn't look nice shouldn't be taken as an indictment of all of them -- it just means I hire a designer when I do web development! I like urlgreyhot as an example of a nicely styled personal site.
Since Drupal has very extensive, multi-user features, it tends to get used more for community sites, where fast loading is more important than really fancy styles. Trip.ee is a site that has been running Drupal since it's inception (something to do with Dutch travel logs, I think).
Dutch travel logs
That's not Dutch. It's Estonian. Not everything you can't read is 'Dutch'.
Dutch: .nl
Estonia: .ee
Considering a switch to Drupal.
I've been running MT for my blogs for the past two years or so and overall I don't have too much trouble with it. My site is getting up there comment-wise, though, and that's brought some slowdown on rebuilds and the like.
I've downloaded and played with Drupal a bit and getting that installed was easy enough, but the whole taxonomy system leaves my head spinning. I currently maintain 7 blogs using MT and I don't see how I would easily do that with Drupal. There's also no out of the box solution in Drupal for adding images to entries. I do like Drupal's threaded comment system and the speed it seems to work at. I have yet to figure out how to edit the templates.
My biggest concern in making a switch, however, would be trying to figure out how to move the just under 2,000 entries and almost 10,000 comments of just my primary blog to Drupal as there doesn't seem to be any utilities for importing of content from other blog systems. I'm debating whether to leave my old pages as static files on the server and just link to them or what. I'm also waiting to see what MT 3 is like.
Drupal may be in my future, but it's definitely harder to understand than MT is.
the whole taxonomy system l
Drupal's taxonomy system is very confusing, but it is also its greatest strength. A powerful taxonomy system, the ability to assign one or more taxonomies, and using differing taxonomies for different kinds of content are great information architecture tools.
Additionally, in the newest versions of Drupal, feeds are automatically generated for every taxonomy term (as well as combinations of terms). This allows for massive flexibility in tracking content that gets added to sites. Adding in the subscriptions module further enables users to subscribe to these differing terms via email as well.
Editing templates is both easy and not. The xtemplate theme is based around what amounts to a standard HTML file with curly braces where content is inserted plus a CSS file. These files can be duplicated and edited, then selected as a separate theme using the admin interface. The chameleon theme is almost entirely CSS based, where only a CSS file needs to be edited.
For moving to Drupal, check the Drupal.org documentation on Migrating from MovableType. It's not easy, and for purposes of URL consistency, you may actually keep your archives static. Much like Windows (:P), choosing a publishing system and using it for a significant amount of time creates a certain amount of lock-in.
The lock-in comes not only from content "stuck" in another system, but fully understanding its foibles. I may very well be sitting on the other side of the fence: I'm a Drupal expert, but an MT novice (see? that's me pointing out my bias).
For running an individual, personal blog (or blogs), Drupal may not be the answer. But I still like WordPress better than MT ;)
More on MT vs. Drupal
I currently run a ton of MT Weblogs. Once set up, they're actually easy enough for the "casual" user to post to. What I don't like is that there is NO concept of centralized management - using a common template across multiple Weblogs can be done (like you might want to do at, say, a magazine or newspaper), but it's a royal pain (and, yes, I realize MT was not developed as an enterprise or sitewide tool).
I'm also currently building a Drupal community site. I love the taxonomy (because our main site already runs on a taxonomy) and the cool integration of imported RSS feeds (at least with the import module in 4.3x, grr, I'm distressed that RSS-items-as-nodes goes away in 4.4). What I hate is the lack of a Movable Type-like tag library. Yes, xtemplate has some {tags}, but what a non-PHP scripter (and here I raise my hand) can do with them is extremely limited compared to what you can do with MT tags (or, for that matter, their counterparts in pMachine) - unless you want to go mucking around in the theme files.
This is related to another peeve I have - the difficulty of assigning "public" meta data to Drupal documents (i.e., HTML meta keyword and description tags). The answer I keep seeing on the Drupal site and mailing lists is "Google ignores them and so do we," which is, I think, a bit short-sighted because there are other uses for these tags, especially on intranets, where it would make sense to have a search module that could be "tuned" to give higher weights to these tags than the body content.
"Also known as "individual pa
"Also known as "individual pages for posts turned off by default"."
Individual pages are turned on by default, and they are the default archive link for new weblogs created by MT. The URLs are very unfriendly in the default installation, however.
"Pop-up comments"
Technically true, and pop-ups are the default. But comments also appear by default in the individual entry archives, which search engines pick up.
"Complicated, hard to use admin and posting system"
I'd be interested to see your more detailed critique, but that is not as big a problem for non-technical users as installation is. There are detailed installation instructions, but there are a lot of steps and a lot of points at which installation can be blocked because of lack of a library or because of skipping a step unintentionally.
"You can't use MT commercially without paying a licensing fee."
There are even some who argue that the license is "illegal".
One thing you missed: MT not only does not come out of the box with full feeds, but even the excerpted feeds they generate do not adhere to the specs.
Richard
Thanks for the clarifications
Thanks for the clarifications, Richard.
The last time I recall running MT, I don't remember seeing individual posts in the archive -- the permalinks always had anchor tags, not full URLs. Has this changed at some point?
Ease of installation I actually find to be less of a barrier (many web hosting companies offer one-click installs of all these scripts, including MT and Drupal). I've found the actually posting interface to not be end-user friendly, i.e. people have logged in and run screaming from the interface.
Of course, with the proliferation of desktop tools that can post to weblogs using a variety of APIs, I actually see this becoming less of a problem.