Face Off: Movable Type 4 vs. WordPress 2.2

Once upon a time, in a TCP packet not far from here there was no blogosphere. A web-based journal was not known as a blog, or for that matter known much at all, not to mentioned considered a sane spend of one's precious time.

Back then internauts given to verbosity had to either hack their own blogging platform together or nag a nerd to do it for them. My, how times have changed. And now we have so many choices.

The one-off implementations eventually gave way to Movable Type which lowered the bar and required slightly less coding ability to get a blog up and running. Movable Type led the way for a while but eventually an upstart platform, known as WordPress, came along and pulled ahead of MT through a combination of a painless setup process and a vibrant community.

With both platforms recently releasing highly anticipated new versions, Jordan Chark of mashable.com took the two updated engines and compared them head-to-head on 6 criteria:

1. Installation
2. Interface
3. Customization
4. Affordability and Accessibility
5. Stability
6. Additional Features

While we highly recommend you read the full comparison, we are going to spoil the suspense anyway. Jordan's analysis led him to conclude that WordPress outperformed Movable Type in 3 of the 6 categories: Installation, Interface, and Affordability and Accessibility. Furthermore, Jordan believes that the two platforms are the same with regard to Customization and Stability. Unfortunately, that leaves only the "Additional Features" category where Jordan considers Movable Type to be a better choice than WordPress.

As one would imagine, this review was greeted with enthusiasm by WordPress supporters and scorn from the Movable Type camp; and if you don't believe us just take a look at the comments.

Side-stepping the debate in the name of greater objectivity, we would rather ask (and answer) two questions which were not part of the original piece:

1. Is the release of Movable Type 4 and the GPL'ed Movable Type Open Source (MTOS) enough to bring MT back to prominence in the blogging engine space?
   Some would argue that Movable Type never relinquished its spot at the top, but there is no denying that many dedicated MT users made the leap to WordPress when Movable Type switched to a payware model. The writers at Splash Press Media asked this very question and while they had quite a bit of praise for MT 4, ultimately they could not recommend that existing WordPress users move to Movable Type 4.
2. Does it make sense to limit the discussion to only Movable Type and WordPress?
   Where does a product like Expression Engine fit into the argument? What about a platform geared more toward multi-site implementations like Drupal? The blogging platform market is no longer a two horse race. The proliferation of available products has made a scenario-based needs analysis, whereby any purchase/selection decision is based on those findings and priorities, absolutely vital.

Are you digging the MT vs WP jungle fight? If you haven't seen enough blood spilt by the faithful, why then you must tune into 10 Reasons to Go Movable Type 4.0 vs. WordPress 2.3 and Movable Type 4.0 vs. Expression Engine 1.6. There's even more blogging news here.

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Tags: blogging, drupal, expression engine, movable type, wordpress