Movable Type 4.0 from Wordpress.com user's perspective
The long-awaited, more open Movable Type 4 was released a while ago and I installed it to see how good it actually is. My review is from the perspective of a guy who’s been working with Wordpress.com’s blogging platform for over a year. It’s also good to know that I couldn’t hit the problems that would await me in day-to-day use of MT4 over a longer period than couple of weeks.
For comparison, I’ve tried out stand-alone version of Wordpress some time ago and of course this blog is hosted by Wordpress.com’s own service. This is the easiest way to start blogging, but most people want to progress to their own hosts at some point. Now, Wordpress’s stand-alone version runs on PHP, which is supported by virtually 100% of web hosts so no problem there. MT4 on the other hand depends on Perl and some extensions, some which you can be sure are not installed by default by your host. Now, MT4 requires only few of these extensions to actually run, but to get all the features (like automatic thumbnail generation) you probably need to ask your hosting provider to install a couple Perl extensions This shouldn’t be a problem as long as your host has customer support (or you got admin rights).Installing both is a breeze, as long as you’ve installed a couple of web apps in the past and all your Perl/PHP/Webserver/SQL settings are sound. Just extract the archive and point your browser to the installation script and off you go. The easiest route seems to be if you follow the Apache+MySQL+PHP school of web app infrastructure on a popular/widely-supported standard Linux distribution. The web is full of tutorials and help for such a setup. Any more exotic and you might be on your own.When I launched MT4, I was impressed by its design and layout. I had tried the first beta of MT4, so the design wasn’t totally new to me, but unlike in the first beta, the admin panel worked. The settings are grouped nicely. The whole experience is somewhat more pleasant than the one in Wordpress, which is also really easy to navigate – its just that MT4 seems to offer more in less space used. It’s a bit unfair to compare MT to Wordpress, because Wordpress’s admin panel is one of the few good ones around in free web apps. I have had continuing, erratic problems trying to work with Wordpress.com using Safari (3 public beta), but with other browsers, things work fine.The only big downside with MT4 is that the documentation is not ready. There are still things that I’ve no idea how they work and while the documentation site mentions these things and even have links to these issues, the links themselves go nowhere. This is bad. Otherwise, MT4 is totally solid solution for any serious blogging. Wordpress has a comprehensive codex wiki available, but it too might miss some answers newbies’ questions. But that’s why there are forums.My favourite feature is the native support for Markdown and Textile, features that are available for both Wordpress and MT3.5, but these work out of the box. The editor on MT4 is, in my opinion, superior to the one in Wordpress. Then again, I think majority of people prepare the blogs in some other editor (I use Google Docs) and only do the last-stage tuning in the blogging engine’s editor. In any case, MT4’s editor manages to use its space much more efficiently than the one in WP.Wordpress shines in its ease of installation and use. Out of the box, Wordpress has (better) visitor analysis. Its by no means Google Analytics, but in my opinion, Wordpress stats give the information average blogger needs.MT4 is a radical new direction from MT3.5 and as a relatively new product, MT4-specific plug-ins are still somewhat rare. This is of course offset by the magnitude of built-in features, but Wordpress kicks MT4’s ass when it comes to plug-ins. Both offer extensive support of any blogging-related protocols and services you can name.They both support variety of comment authentication, either out of the box or through plug-ins. When it comes to things like OpenID, well, it’s there. I’m actually surprised that neither comes with built-in support to use authentication through Yahoo! or open authentication providers similar to it – even though MT4 naturally supports Six Apart’s other services’ (Vox, Typepad…) authentication schemes.The major difference between MT4 and Wordpress is that the latter is totally free. Six Apart has promised a Open Source version of MT4 later, but that probably doesn’t change the fact that for commercial use, MT4 is going to cost you a little. For personal use, it’s free and Google ads and such don’t make your site “commercial” or for-profit so for many this isn’t a problem. Wordpress is licensed under GPL, so all your freedoms are there. While not a deal-breaker, this license issue is probably the major reason for many to go for Wordpress.Given that an average web dev is more familiar with PHP than Perl, customizing and extending Wordpress will probably be easier to many. If all you want to do is to customize templates, MT4 isn’t difficult either as it uses a custom template engine so you can keep your hands clean of any Perl coding. Wordpress also has its template engine for people not wanting to touch PHP (who would want?), but with some knowledge of PHP you can go deeper.MT4 comes off as more refined than Wordpress, and even though it doesn’t make that much of a difference in the long run, things like nice admin panel and stylish built-in themes give it a good first-run experience. If you know what you’re doing, you’re up and blogging in no time with either software. It really comes down to your own needs and the limits of your web hosting. Use whatever gives you most control and power over your publishing process. Many think that MT4 is more professional and one reason is the first-run settings – through customization you can easily make either look like the other. Where MT4 really shows its power is when you admin and/or run many blogs on it – somewhat rare scenario on average.The one rather major problem I ran with MT4.0 was that I couldn’t get my Pages listed in the templates using the widget sets. The other issue that was just silly was that even though I was the blog admin I had problems commenting to one of the blogs. I hope these are fixed in the next release. Documentation for making scheduled posts was also missing, which is a bit evil as there’s no indication that it won’t work unless you add a cron job.Here at Tech IT Easy, things work (and don’t work) on Wordpress.com’s service. By far not the most optimal blogging platform, but it gets the work done. Then stand-alone version gives you naturally much more, but usually with a price of your own hosting. With your own hosting, you probably need to evaluate your blogging options, of which there are many. Migrating to Wordpress is usually the most easiest and simplest solution, most web-hosts might even have one-click installers for it. In the end, though I personally enjoy the MT4 experience much more.
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Hey, a pretty complete review!
I too am very attracted to the MT4 platform, after extensively working on Wordpress (.com and .org) blogs and Blogspot-ones. It just seems fresher and the editor feels like it’s the way things should be. On Wordpress/Blogger’s versions, I never know how the editor will format things, which is highly annoying, and, for instance, lead to many formatting issues on our About-page. Then again, I’m one of those people who likes to pay for blogging-editors to avoid those problems, like the excellent Marsedit and Ecto.
The biggest qualm I have about the hosted solution of Wordpress, however, is the lack of support for 3rd party code. Wordpress.com pretty much prevents you from installing any script or embedding any flash-code; for the latter they only support YouTube, as far as I know. Instead they should keep a safe-list of services that work, and keep updating it.
And, but this is an internal issue, I don’t think that Wordpress.com manages the process of migrating to new domains well at all. The loss of page-rank, as suffered by this blog, is inexcusable and would even be cause for an immediate refund, if you ask me.
But yeah, I don’t want my bitterness to distract your MT4 discussion
Well done review. Amen on the documentation issues. They’re improving, but they almost killed me initially and are a bit late to be helpful now.
One thing though, you said:
“The major difference between MT4 and Wordpress is that the latter is totally free. Six Apart has promised a Open Source version of MT4 later, but that probably doesn’t change the fact that for commercial use, MT4 is going to cost you a little.”
Not true. Commercial use of the MTOS will not cost anyone. GPL is GPL. What will cost you is if you want support (and other contractual things company lawyers like) from Six Apart and some advanced features (via addon packs) like Oracle or LDAP support.
What is not determined is what exactly is MTOS (6A has stated that it won’t just be the current product with a different license) and what features over time will they choose not to GPL.
Timothy, thanks for your clarification. I couldn’t find that much information about the open source version (other than that it’s coming this fall) from movable type’s site.
You’re right that MTOS won’t cost anything as it is GPL, just like Wordpress is. It’s just as you say that no-one really knows what features make it to the OS version.
I think their need for GPL’d version comes from competition (notably Wordpress), but I also believe they still want most of their commercial clients to go for the paid MT4. It’s a balancing act, let’s see how it plays out.
Of course, in time, people are free to impelement the “missing” features to MTOS themselves – at least inofficially.