David
6th Aug 2009, 02:07 pm
For some time I've been planning a multi-blog platform at CADTutor and when I did my first round of research over 2 years ago there was only one real option; MovableType (http://movabletype.org/). Now I've played about with MT and find it completely inscrutable. Sure, installation is the same as with any app. of this type but after that - how to proceed? Today, I've been nosing round the MT community to see if I can plan my installation and configuration but everywhere I look, the community seems to have gone. The latest blog posts and tutorials all end around October 2008. The user forum is very quiet. What happened? At one point MT was the darling of the web community and the only blogging platform anyone worth their salt would consider.
Could it be that WordPress MU (http://mu.wordpress.org/) has killed MT? Or has it just been a long, slow decline? MT is still being actively developed and it's a fully-featured, professional and stable platform. My guess is that MT has suffered 3 symptoms:
1. It's too difficult to get it to do what most people want "out of the box". For example, like me, most people would want a multi-blog platform to be headed up from a single aggregate blog on the homepage. To get MT to do this, the admin has to learn a special tagging language and compile a special page - maybe a week of faffing about to get something close to what you want. WPMU assumes that most people will want this model and installs it as a default - simple.
2. The rise in popularity of WordPress and Drupal (http://drupal.org/) (both now seen unstoppable with active development and support communities) has done for MT. If you just want to blog, go for WordPress and if you want something more complex (and flexible) go for Drupal.
3. MT is essentially written in PERL, not a language most people will feel comfortable with whereas WordPress and Drupal are written in PHP. Clearly, this makes them both much more "accessible" in terms of development.
The upshot of all of this is that now, despite the time (and money) I've invested in MT, I'm on the verge of dumping it in favour of WordPress MU. The fact is, I can see no future for MT in the mass-market, despite a relatively recent move to Open Source for the basic application.
I'm going to spend a couple of days looking at WPMU before making a final decision but at the moment, the arguments seem compelling.
Could it be that WordPress MU (http://mu.wordpress.org/) has killed MT? Or has it just been a long, slow decline? MT is still being actively developed and it's a fully-featured, professional and stable platform. My guess is that MT has suffered 3 symptoms:
1. It's too difficult to get it to do what most people want "out of the box". For example, like me, most people would want a multi-blog platform to be headed up from a single aggregate blog on the homepage. To get MT to do this, the admin has to learn a special tagging language and compile a special page - maybe a week of faffing about to get something close to what you want. WPMU assumes that most people will want this model and installs it as a default - simple.
2. The rise in popularity of WordPress and Drupal (http://drupal.org/) (both now seen unstoppable with active development and support communities) has done for MT. If you just want to blog, go for WordPress and if you want something more complex (and flexible) go for Drupal.
3. MT is essentially written in PERL, not a language most people will feel comfortable with whereas WordPress and Drupal are written in PHP. Clearly, this makes them both much more "accessible" in terms of development.
The upshot of all of this is that now, despite the time (and money) I've invested in MT, I'm on the verge of dumping it in favour of WordPress MU. The fact is, I can see no future for MT in the mass-market, despite a relatively recent move to Open Source for the basic application.
I'm going to spend a couple of days looking at WPMU before making a final decision but at the moment, the arguments seem compelling.