Goodbye, Movable Type
Posted by unbrand on 16 May 2004 | 12 Comments
It’s been a fun couple of years, but it’s time to move on. Why?
- The recent licensing announcement came out of nowhere and is overly restrictive. I, like many others, don’t mind paying for good software. I recently dropped $500 for a mail server (CommuniGate Pro) and I’m glad I did. Well, I thought I was spending that much, but Mandrakesoft charged my credit card $49,900 and I have no idea why the purchase was approved, but that’s another story.
- MT 3.0 is not a major upgrade. It’s a bugfix, and in a bad one at that. In order to fix the rebuilding performance, which they sorely needed to do, they changed the behavior of MTEntries, the basic unit of functionality in their code. I don’t even want to think about the changes I’d have to make to my 3 blogs as a result of that one. Mena’s blog entry describes Six Apart’s stance on the new release.
- The one major new feature, comment registration via TypeKey is a Bad Idea. This concept of centralized user registration across sites has been tried several times before. Firefly tried this with Passport. That failed. Microsoft bought the company and kept Passport. Microsoft is the only company on the planet who could possibly make Passport “work” and that’s only because they force it down people’s throats. You want to download a free set of utilities from Microsoft? Gotta log in to your Passport account. The reason why these efforts fail, and I’ve heard this from multiple site publishers, is that the publishers don’t want to give up that data. In a way, it’s proprietary to the site. How would site X, which has an implicit contract with its visitors to provide good service, trust a centralized login authority to provide quality service? Yes it’s a control issue. And a justified one at that.
- When Six Apart announced several months ago that they were going to stick with Perl as the underlying language of MT, I looked the other way. Like when the teacher looks the other way when the normally good student pulls a prank. Or something. Anyway, in 2004, we have fast databases, fast OS’s, cheap memory and disk space. Of course, I’m generalizing to make a point, but that point is that Perl’s notions of conservation of resources at the expense of flexibility in the web application space just don’t apply anymore. PHP has rightly taken the web app world by storm. I held off on using it for a long time because I thought it was a toy. Well, I don’t think that anymore. Sure, you probably have to dig a bit more to get at things that are more on the surface with, say, Java, but damn, it’s easy as hell to create and modify things like blogging software if it’s written in PHP.
- I had hoped Six Apart would pull a rabbit out of a hat and make their Perl-based system perform wonderful, mystical feats of bloggy goodness for MT 3.0. Instead, 3.0 gives us patches to address performance, overzealous licensing because they have employees now, and a pissed-off blog community who feels betrayed. By the way, I honestly do wish Six Apart success. But I’m pretty sure that once the money people came in, they took over and decided that they knew best how to price Movable Type. I hope this past weekend’s storm of negativity about the 3.0 announcement will give Mena and Ben some more ammunition when dealing with the money types.
- Rebuilding. If you are ABCNews.com, you will want to have some of your content be static and served up quickly by your web server. That’s what they do using Tea (a lightweight opensource templating language that provides a thin layer on top of servlets. Very nice.). But god dammit, there is no reason to have a concept of rebuilding your web pages for the vast majority of sites and blogs out there. The flexibility the developer/webmaster/hobbyist gains by pulling bits in dynamically far outweighs any possible greater good achieved by building static pages for your site. Run-time building of pages is simpler and more intuitive and most important possible now that computing resources are commodified for all but the largest sites out there.
- I need to manage 3 blogs across 2 domains. I’m renting a dedicated Linux box at a colo facility, so I have complete control over the box. I can control the version of Apache, the database server, .htaccess files, etc., so there are no real ISP limitations on what I might need to do to get any of these alternatives up and running.
- The main limitation is my time. For example, Drupal looks like a good system, but it’s much bigger than what I need and I don’t want to spend a lot of time tweaking it to behave like a blog. I’m looking for something that has a lot of the outward Movable Type functionality, but with a sane foundation on which it’s built.
- I do need to customize the templates or the system itself to get the functionality I want. Specifically, I need a customized notion of “blog entry” to mean somthing like “a main part, an extended part, and an excerpt, though those pieces might not contain blog text.” I need a flexible notion of entry for the photoblogging site. On that note, Textpattern has the best answer. “Image” is a first-class object in Textpattern, just like entry. Very smart. Tweaking Movable Type to treat a picture like an entry is possible, but not very clean.
And Wordpress is licensed under GPL, which prevents it from suffering the current fate of Movable Type. For an excellent read on that point, check out DiveIntoMark’s take on the issue.
Update: Alan’s Ramblings has a good discussion of the 6 Apart stance and also has a comment from a 6 Apart employee.
Update 2: I updated the chart a bit to reflect more current info; development on these tools moves fast! Some folks mentioned other blog tools like s9y and pMachine Pro which could be good as well. As of now, I’m quite happy with Wordpress 1.2 now that I’ve migrated. Glad to see so many decent alternatives to Movable Type out there.
Here’s a chart of where I ended up… -more->| Drupal | b2evolution | pmachine expression engine | Wordpress | textpattern | typo3 | |
| Rank (1-10) | 5 | 7 | 6 | 8 | 6 | 0 |
| Postgres? | yes | maybe | no | maybe, with a little work | maybe, with a little work | |
| Import from MT? | no | yes | yes | yes, uses import.txt | yes, connects to mysql | |
| Multiple blogs? | yes | yes | yes | yes, via mult. Installation & table prefix | yes, via mult. Installation & table prefix | not really |
| Language? | PHP | PHP | PHP | PHP | PHP | PHP |
| Entry/ext/excerpt | y/n/y, use post metadata | y/n/y, image is a native object | ||||
| Ecto support? | yes | hard to tell | no | yes | no, but v. good web interface | no |
| Trackback? | yes | yes | yes | yes | no, but “mentions” coming soon | no |
| Sub-cats? | yes | yes | yes | yes but must have unique names | yes | prolly |
| Cost | GPL | GPL | $149 | GPL | BSD | GPL |
| Notes | lots of switchers from MT to Drupal – very techie & time-consuming | kind of toy-ish w/smilies, nice admin | designed by mac heads | very MT-like (in a good way). Has multiple answers for old MT link resolution. MT-Blacklist has been ported. Single cat/post. Puts MT extended in post w/”more” tag. Can post by email. | rabid fanbase! Trackback not so important now b/c of Technorati tracking links. Answers abt link resol. work here too. Also has “image” assoc. w/entry. Image is its own table. Sections have own CSS. Puts MT extended in post. | complex, beautiful, but really a CMS |