…Or MT4?
Those of you who are regular readers know that I recently became frustrated with the limitations of my TypePad blog and then became even more frustrated by TypePad support’s response. I made plans to finally move away from TypePad to everyone’s favorite blogging platform, WordPress. I’ve been messing around with WordPress for nearly a month now (and, as you can see, I have not migrated yet). I know everyone loves it, but, I have to admit, it’s a much different world over there, and the learning curve has been a little steep in some areas. And maybe I’m just used to my restrictions, but the fact that there are plugins for EVERYTHING is almost too much of a good thing. How do you know which ones are good? It seems everything I want to do in Wordpress, I have to google to find a plugin.
So, before I committed to WP, I had to check out Movable Type. (You can too, here. The login & pwd is “demo”). Although from the same company that dissed me before, ultimately, it’s about what works best for me.
I discovered that many people abandoned Movable Type a while ago they introduced the pricing structure (for commercial use) and that’s when WP became king of the blogosphere. Apparently, choosing between the two platforms is the blogging world’s version of the cola wars, and WP is Coke.
So without further ado, here are a few things I liked about Movable Type 4:
- Movable Type has a new version, MT4, which “feels” more like what I’m used to from a blogging platform - a polished interface.
- The thing that really caught my attention about MT4 is the ability to have multiple blogs with a single installation - something that WP is incapable of unless you’re using WP-MU, which, quite frankly, looks hard.
- Built-in spam control - no plugin needed
- MT4’s Asset manager is built-in and integrated with native tagging functionality. It’s also pretty sweet.
- Built-in search of posts & pages
- OpenID built-in
- Nifty dashboard with traffic, stats, etc - built-in
- I read somewhere that if you get Dugg, your MT site stays up and your WP site goes down…something to do with the database…? Anyone who can explain this, please comment!
On the other hand, my favorite things about WordPress are:
- The themes! So many themes! I love the themes!
- The plugins - yes, there is one for everything.
- It’s really free. Actually free. No strings.
Obviously, there are a million things that set the two platforms apart, but these are just the main things that interested me. I’m not really concerned with all the nerdy, back-end stuff - only how it affects me. I use web hosts that do the installations for you and offer platform support, so the geeky details are handled. I just want to blog.
I’m torn.
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What is also great about wordpress is the freedom.
You can do to it what you want. Great application you will love it.
Strictly speaking, the “built-in” spam control in MT is a plugin; it’s called SpamLookup. The only difference is that MT happens to include it right in the main download. Being a plugin is a good thing(including for Wordpress). It lets you pick and choose how to manage your spam, as well as update or change those measures when needed without having to update the entire application.
The Digg issue is a little more complicated and to be completely accurate was never strictly true. On a completely base installation, an MT site probably has an arguably better chance of staying up through a traffic flood, yes. This is largely due to MT by default producing static files rather than serving every request dynamically from the database(MT also has a dynamic publishing option, but I don’t use it myeslf; but short version: that would put it in a similar camp to Wordpress and its problems in this regard).
Either way, enough traffic plus a server inadequate to deal with it will bring any site down. And there are plugins for Wordpress that cache content to prevent that from happening.
Just use ExpressionEngine core and rejoice at not having to upgrade WordPress every 20 seconds and rebuilding MT every time you want to make a change. My 2 cents… about all it happens to be worth anyway.
> I read somewhere that if you get Dugg, your MT
> site stays up and your WP site goes
> down…something to do with the database…?
> Anyone who can explain this, please comment!
This is mostly true though given enough traffic or lack of server resources any site, regardless of tool, will go down. A more accurate statement is that MT is more resilient to getting Dugg then WP and other dynamic publishing tools.
WP (and ExpressionEngine since it got mentioned) uses a dynamic publishing model. This means with each request the template by a user via the browser a page is compiled and rendered. The process means that one (and often more) database requests need to be issued to get your content so it can be merged with the markup in the template to produce the page that is sent back to the browser. The benefit is instant gratification for the author.
MT uses a static publishing model. The process of issuing database requests and merging them with the markup in a template is similar; however, MT will write a physical file to your server. These static publishing (formerly referred to as rebuilding in MT parlance) events are triggered in a number of explicit and implicit ways.
With a static file, when a user requests a page your web server simple reads the file and sends it down the pipe to the browser. The key benefit here is that each request does not need to make any database requests and there is very little computation needed. This makes MT powered sites more resilient to sudden spike in activity such as getting Dugg because serving static files use significantly less server resources.
Another benefit is that your database can go down, but your site will still be viewable. Only accepting comments and publishing new content would be affected. IMHO that’s better then your site just disappearing.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tappnel/152033062/
There are a few trade offs to the static model that are worth mentioning. Given enough content or unoptimized templates you can experience very long publish times. You also have to be mindful of frequently updated sidebar or footer content in archive pages. MT’s default templates design around this issue. If you really want to include something of this nature there are work arounds using server or JavaScript includes. The issue here is that it’s not as inuitive for the developer/publisher designing the site.
I know that there are a few caching options for WP (wp-cache comes to mind) that will help it perform better making it more resilient. I haven’t worked with it personally so take that for what it’s worth. I’ve read mixed reviews and still a fair number of WP feeds going down when Dugg. Perhaps that is just a lack of user awareness. I don’t know.
> What is also great about wordpress is the freedom.
Define freedom? MT will be open source under a GPL license in the next couple of weeks.
http://appnel.com/code/log/200.....ls-on-mtos
On MT’s resiliency when “getting Dugg”
sarahintampa wonders about claims that if you get Dugg, your MT site stays up and your WP site goes down. What follows is a lightly edited version of the comment I made to her post.
Added to Tim’s blog, but here are a few thoughts…
There are actually several WP caching plugins, which are more accurately described as static-publishing plugins (they effectively publish the pages to disk), and they apparently work fairly well, from what I understand. “WP Super Cache”, I think, is the latest iteration, which is supposed to be the best of the bunch.
It’s also probably worth mentioning that MT has a dynamic publishing model that makes it just as likely to break as WP - in fact, sometimes more, since the MT dynamic model requires such heavy database use with every request (even when caching!).
I’ve found that judicious use of the dynamic model, while keeping the heavily-accessed pages such as indexes and individual archives as static archives, works well. Notably, category and monthly archives work well as dynamic archives. For whatever reason, MT4(.01) doesn’t seem to support author archives as dynamic, so they have to be static, so keep that in mind.
My god, how is this even a dillema!
Wordpress. Don’t be a wuss!
-Vlad
Thanks for all the feedback. I appreciate all the explanations and valuable input!