Dr. Matt Lee (mattl)

There’s some Typepad vs WordPress.com going on. Again. I jumped in and left my two cents worth.
At first, I used Movable Type for my blogs, but I dropped it as many people did when WordPress came out. WordPress is GPL, and at the time, this wasn’t particularly important to me, but as time went on, I began to value this more and more. Upgrading WordPress is a pain, and there are updates too frequent for my liking.
So, I moved to WordPress.com — adding a domain name to the site was easy, and cheap. I didn’t like the restrictions and the pay structure of WordPress.com, and when I realised it is run on a proprietary web server, I decided I needed to try and find an alternative.
Should I go back to self hosting? Yes. Should I go back to using WordPress on my server? No.
Movable Type had gone GPL. Movable Type was free software now! Initially, I had some problems with configuration, getting things set up. But now I’m really happy using Movable Type.
There are some really good features in Movable Type:
* Static HTML — renders your blog as static HTML files on disk. I can’t express how much I love this.
* Multiple Blog by default — WordPress MU. Meh. No thanks.
* Good set of themes by default — WordPress needs to ship with some better themes.
* Infrequent upgrades — 150 or so days since the last security update to MT.
Problems with Movable Type for me:
* The name — ‘Movable Type Open Source’ is too long, and too confusing. Movable Type SHOULD be the name for the product. It shouldn’t be a different version, or different name for the free software version. I’ll admit I don’t like the term ‘open source’, which adds to this.
* Not enough themes out there — WordPress has pwned MT on this.
* Too many confusing editing modes — Markdown, Textile, etc.
I’d like to see WordPress address some of these. I’d like to see MT address them too.
What annoys me is what feels like name calling. It seems a little weighted on the MT side — far too much WordPress bashing for my liking. Matt has been better about this, but I’ve seen a fair amount of it from both sides.
I’d like to see a service — Akismet or MT AntiSpam released as GPL, and soon. I want to run my own version for my own blogs. I don’t want to send all my comments to a third party.
I’d also like to see both projects contribute directly to getting good, up-to-date packages of their products into GNU/Linux distributions like Debian and Fedora. They’re already there, sure. Given the number of updates from WordPress, they should be distributing their own Debian packages. Movable Type should do the same.
Run a repository, do it right.