Blogging Platforms: WordPress vs Movable Type

If you are interested in starting your own blog, on your own Web site, you are problem looking at different blogging platforms. And over and over again, you have probably come across WordPress and Movable Type. Both offer customization options, and both make it possible for someone without a great deal of technical knowledge (for the techies: Movable Type uses perl and WordPress uses PHP) to creat a blog and blog posts. If you know a little HTML, that doesn't hurt, and both WordPress and Movable Type are compatible with using HTML to create links, tags and other assorted goodies that you should have on a good blog post. But there are key differences:

Price. This is the big key difference. Movable Type is a company that wants to make a profit. Therefore, the software costs money (right around $70). WordPress, on the other hand, is free. It is an open source deal, so all you have to do is download it (although it can be tricky getting the MySQL databased synched up and ready to go. However, most people find that WordPress is easier to download than Movable Type.

Page loading. WordPress is dynamic. This means that each time someone pulls up the Web page (or blogpost) it is created on the fly from the data base. Movable Type is static, which means that the whole page is created and then stored. Movable Type pages will load faster. With WordPress, there is a delay, and this can also affect server performance on a high traffic Web site or blog as the page is pulled from the database each time a page is served. Movable Type pages are easier to backup as a result, as you can backup each individual page. With WordPress, the entire database needs to be backed up if you want to back up your blog posts. Both blogging platforms are working to become more flexible, though. Movable Type is adding more dynamism to its platform, and WordPress has created a cache system for more popular pages to cut down on load time.

Customized categories. This is where Movable Type annoys me the most. There are category options, and it is possible to do some customizable category based syndication, but it doesn't hold a candle to WordPress. WordPress supports the best customizable syndication for blog posts, and if you are interested in syndication (which you should be for your blog posts), WordPress is most flexible.

Tags. Movable Type does have the upper hand in terms of tags, however. Template tags created with Smarty. While its not the end of the world that WordPress doesn't support Smarty, it would be nice.

Finally, one of the things I like about WordPress that doesn't exist in Movable Type is the fact that you can create non-blog Web pages using WordPress. Creating other forms and pages for things like feedback and search is easier and content management is possible with WordPress. For the self-publisher, WordPress is the way to go. It is inexpensive (you can't beat the free price!) and it offers more versatility than Movable Type.