Why WordPress?
I said earlier that I would write about why Iâve made the move from Movabletype to WordPress. I want to say right at the start that my decision really isnât a criticism of Movabletype. It has served me extremely well for more than a year, and has made my life immeasurably easier. But one thing Iâve found as Iâve been keeping this blog is that your needs (and skills) change as time goes on, so that you canât necessarily forsee what you will need in a blogging tool a year or two years down the line. The thing that prompted my itchy feet in the end was the problem of rebuilding the site.
Movabletype (MT) and WordPress (WP) have a lot of similarities (indeed, many of the new features Iâve included in my new design could have been accomplished with MT), but one fundamental difference: MT produces static web pages, and WP produces dynamic ones. This difference is an important one; every time the content of the page needs to change in a static system (which can happen quite frequently with a weblog with comments, trackbacks and so on), the entire page needs to be rebuilt. If you have monthly and category archives, those pages need to be rebuilt too. Rebuilding is pretty speedy when you have a small number of posts, but it gets slower as time goes on and you accumulate more content. However, with a dynamic system, the changes are made the instant someone reloads the page.
I tried a number of different blogging tools, but eventually settled on WP after setting up a test blog and playing with it for a while. Itâs a great systemâextremely easy to install and configure, and yet with a lot of scope for advanced customization. Better yet, itâs Open Source, so anyone can contribute hacks and fixes for it. Itâs also free as in beer. Not that I begrudge paying for software, especially something that I depend on every day. I donated to MT when I started using it, and I consider that money very well spent.
So, whatâs so great about WP? As I said, many of the features can be achieved in MT with plugins, but these are the main virtues of WP âout of the boxâ:
- Itâs very easy to installâyou just upload the files to your server, optionally change the permissions on one file and add the details of your mySQL database, and thatâs it. Very simple.
- The default templates are very straightforward. You only really need to set up two templates, and the default templates are pretty good without any tinkering at all.
- The default templates and stylesheet are standards-compliant out of the box, and despite my best efforts, I didnât break the compliance with all my tinkering. After Iâd done the re-design, I braced myself for the process of validation and the pages of errors that it would inevitably throw up. I was astounded when there were only a couple of minor errors on the pages and CSS stylesheet, which were easily fixed.
- The admin interface is quick to load and simple to navigate. Itâs also quite easy to incorporate an âinterface pageâ for your own functions, so hacks can be integrated properly.
- Thereâs an integrated link manager which makes it easy to keep your blogroll up to date and to include it in flexible ways into your pages.
- Characters like ampersands and quote marks are auto-converted to proper HTML entities.
- You can choose to have text smilies auto-converted to graphical smilies (this works in the comments tooâtry it!)
- There are various measures against comment spam. It protects against comment-flooding (so spambots canât submit more than one spam comment every 10 seconds) and automated submission via a script rather than the form on the page, and you can set comment moderation so that incoming comments are held in a queue until you approve them. If things get really bad you can ensure that only people who have registered with you can post
spamcomments. This is another benefit of a dynamic system; if you hold a comment in a queue or it gets flagged as spam, it doesnât get published to your page in the first place, thus denying the spammers even a few minutes of Google page rank benefits. - You can nest categories, which makes a lot more sense than a flat list in many instances.
- There is a really easy import script for MT entries. It took no more than a few seconds to import about 550 posts and about 1800 comments. Flawlessly.
- URI re-writing, so that each entry has a search engine- and human-friendly URI. Youâll see that individual entries have the format
../archives/year/month/day/title-of-post/and you can view all the posts for a particular month or day by entering part of the URI (e.g.../archives/2004/03/).
Those are just the features that are built in; you can add a lot more functionality with Hacks, which is remarkably easyâeven for someone who doesnât know PHP (of which more later).
Iâm really pleased with the move. I think that Iâve got all of the functionality that I had before and a bit more, and I feel confident that the system will scale well as the content builds over time. The only major thing WP lacks at the moment is the ability to run multiple blogs from one installation (though you can install it multiple times in different directories and share one mySQL database). I wouldnât be surprised if this feature gets added at some point.
Over the next few days, Iâll provide a bit more detail of how I set the WP blog up, for anyone who is interested.
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Like a (MT) Refugee It was unexpected that I might be joining the MT exodus after 6A announced its pricing policy for MT 3.0.----- what a nice clean layout, and the preview in the comments (which I now notice) is pretty cool too. anyway, thanks for the detailed overview of wordpress vs. mt â you make me want to abandon mt again (which I took up again after having used blosxom and then tinderbox). Iâll probably start playing with wordpress for funâ¦.
by bob @ 11/04/2004 8:05 pm • Permalink •
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I really like the new style youâve created. Itâs enough like the old that it doesnât feel drastically different⦠just upgraded.
by Nathan @ 12/04/2004 3:04 am • Permalink •
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Dynamic pages put a lot more stress on your server, though, because the page has to be regenerated every time itâs viewed; not just when you update or when someone leaves a comment.
(there is less process-generation stress involved in using PHP rather than Perl/CGI; but Iâd still estimate that for most sites MT takes up less CPU time overall than WP. There was an interesting rant I read once - I think it was on kuro5hin.org - about Why MT Is Evil, which went on about process-creation a lot. And there was a lot of âbecause I donât like the sort of people that use MTâ in it too, of course.)
by Caitlin @ 12/04/2004 8:04 am • Permalink •
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bob: Thanks. Itâs worth a try. Since itâs free, you can easily install it in a sub-directory off your site root and play around with it. One word of warning; it uses mod_rewrite, so donât install it in a subdirectory of your main blog, or it will re-write your URLs.
Nathan: That was the planâa fresher, brighter look.
Caitlin: Yes, I should have said that. Itâs swings and roundabouts I suppose, and the advantages and disadvantages probably depend a bit on how much traffic you get. If you get lots of traffic, but few comments, a PHP system will be using more server CPU, but if you get lots of comments relative to visits, it might be the other way around. From a purely selfish point of view, I donât really care about the server load as I donât have to worry about it (unless my hosts complain about it), but I do care about rebuilding which takes up my time :-D I certainly wouldnât claim that a PHP system is better in all respects. For one thing, if something in your installation breaks, people instantly see the errors on the page!
by bsag @ 12/04/2004 9:04 am • Permalink •
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The CPU usage issue may surprise you. Unfortunately, I donât have any figures to reference, but one of my former hosting providers had a number of users that ran âblogs. The majority of them ran PHP-Nuke, which is dynamic (in fact, the setup and configuration was provided as a part of their user control panel software.)
However, I and a few other users ran MT instead. For months where we had a lot of posts we all received numerous warnings about CPU utilization that corresponded with the times that we rebuilt MT due to new posts. The process time was short, but heavy (as opposed to the folks running the dynamic systemâI received some logs for that for comparison: CPU usage was more constant, but didnât have any heavy usage peaks the way MT did.)
by Nathan @ 12/04/2004 2:05 pm • Permalink •
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for whatever reason, the font is very difficult for me to read, and thereâs a twenty sec-ncd lag when i tyuupe my commentsâ¦.
by stacy @ 12/04/2004 7:05 pm • Permalink •
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Welcome onboard. Cool layout
(Except for the yellow color, Iâm not much of a fan of that)
by Michael Heilemann @ 13/04/2004 6:05 am • Permalink •
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by dave m @ 13/04/2004 10:04 am • Permalink •
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by dave m @ 13/04/2004 10:05 am • Permalink •
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Welcome to the WP family!
Regarding CPU usage, peaks of CPU utilization is not good, compared to continuous use amounting to very little process cycles. Spikes of CPU use can take down a server, like I learned.
by markku @ 13/04/2004 3:05 pm • Permalink •
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markku: (Our comments got interleaved) Your site was another that impressed me. I know that design has little to do with the engine you use to power a site, but subjectively if you find that a lot of people using a particular engine have really cool site designs, it is encouraging.
by bsag @ 13/04/2004 4:04 pm • Permalink •
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Nathan: Thatâs interesting. I guess that hosts would rather have steady CPU usage rather than unpredictable peaks.
stacy: Which font? The preview seems to work OK for me. What browser are you using on which platform?
Michael Heilemann: Thanks! Your site was one of the ones that made me think it might be very cool to use WP. You donât like the yellow? I quite like it, though I wish it was possible to get a paler yellow without it disappearing altogether. It might be one of those colours that looks radically different on different platforms.
dave m: Your smilies didnât get converted. Weird. You broke it!
by bsag @ 13/04/2004 4:04 pm • Permalink •
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Welcome to Wordpress, and Iâm glad youâve made rapid and excellent use of the media manager
by denyerec @ 15/04/2004 6:04 pm • Permalink •
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Nice layout⦠I wish I had the artistic ability to even design such things. Instead, I just found one I liked on www.alexking.org and played with some of the colors and just went from there⦠I added a few hacks here and there to suit my needs and now I have a blog I actually somewhat like instead of that lame blogger.com way of doing things. I guess that was a good place to start, but I prefer having my blog on my own server, to say the least. Plus if you donât like something about WP, you have the ability to change it exactly the way you want it. Canât beat that.
by Kevin @ 16/04/2004 8:04 am • Permalink •
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denyerec: I love your Media manager! Itâs been something Iâve been wanting to do for ages, but didnât have the proper know-how to implement myself. Itâs so easy to maintain.
Kevin: Thanks! Thereâs nothing wrong with using a pre-made stylesheet, and the ones on Alex Kingâs site are very good. Mine was mostly an upgrade of my old style, so it wasnât as bad as having to start from scratch. Iâm really loving WordPress, and Iâm surprised how much I can tinker with, even with my limited PHP knowledge.
by bsag @ 17/04/2004 5:04 pm • Permalink •
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Well, it took me a while to notice your site had been updated since the RSS link changed, and it took me a little while after that to write a comment about it
Your site was probably the second MT site that I ever saw and it was one of the reasons I looked into using MT. I guess nowâs as good a time as any to do a feature comparison of MT and WP for myself.
Congrats on the redesign⦠looks great.
by Edward @ 22/04/2004 10:04 pm • Permalink •
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Adios MovableType El tan ansiado upgrade esperado a MovableType 3.0 para muchos ha llegado como un balde de agua fria. Valió la...
by edmz @ 13/05/2004 7:05 pm • Permalink •
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I know this is an older post, but it seemed relevant.
I was just curious: with the furor of the newly-released licensing prices for Movable Type 3.0, how do you feel now about your move to WordPress?
by Nathan @ 14/05/2004 8:05 pm • Permalink •
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Nathan: Hehe, pretty good
I've been away for a couple of days, so missed all the brouhaha. I think it's fair enough for them to charge, but there don't seem to be any new features in 3.0, and the 'free version' is much more restricted than the previous version. I think it's fair to say that it hasn't gone down too well. I'm glad I'm not faced with the decision of whether to cough up the money or notâI don't think it would be an easy choice.
by bsag @ 15/05/2004 3:05 pm • Permalink •
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MovableType 3 Sting Completely sick of the comment spammers. MT-Blacklist is great at what it does, but only works after a string has been blacklisted, so every morning brings a heap of new garbage, "flies buzzing around my eyes, blood on my saddle." Is the only viable ...
by birdhouse.org @ 04/06/2004 9:07 am • Permalink •
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In which I consider the WordPress exodus. But she's a girl: Why WordPress? via birdhouse.org: MovableType 3 Sting Movabletype (MT) and WordPress (WP) have a lot of similarities (indeed, many of the new features I've included in my new design could have been accomplished with MT), but...
by Snappy the Clam @ 04/06/2004 3:07 pm • Permalink •
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Making the switch I'm thinking of switching from Movable Type. Why? Well, a couple reasons, purely personal. I like to try new things, and I'd like to extend this to blogging software and see what else is out there. The Ben-Mena-SFO-MT-cutesy-hipness annoys me,...
by Letter Never Sent @ 23/06/2004 8:06 pm • Permalink •
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[...] 2:27
by Jeremy's Little Corner Of The Web... » Why Word @ 24/06/2004 1:06 am • Permalink •
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And a few more links lingering in the in-box This housecleaning is endless.
by clock -- watching time, the only true currency @ 15/07/2004 5:08 am • Permalink •
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Why WordPress?
Filed under: WordPress, Blogging â bsag @ 7:59 pm GMT
I said earlier that I would write about why Iâve made the move from Movabletype to WordPress. I want to say right at the start that my decision really isnât a criticism of Movabletype. ...
by recnow' blog @ 24/12/2004 2:12 pm • Permalink •
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