This blog has, until now, run on Movable Type. I initially chose Movable Type when I set up my first self-hosted blog back in 2002. Back then Movable Type was the only real choice in this area and it had the bonus that it was written in Perl so I could hack on it if I wanted to. Of course I never got round to doing that.
Since then I’ve set up many blogs and they’ve pretty much all used Movable Type. But over the last year or so I’ve been wondering if that’s the right choice. There are a few reasons for this, but the main one is the relative popularity of MT compared with other platforms. There just isn’t the community of people producing themes and plugins for MT that is for, say, WordPress.
I’m already pretty impressed. Moving the stuff over from MT was pretty painless and I’m already reaping the benefit of the larger ecosystem. I’ve found plugins that deal simply with things like Google Adsense and Google Analytics.
Currently the links to the monthly archives are broken. But I’m sure I’ll get those fixed in the next day or so. I’ll be monitoring the error logs closely to see if there are any other missing pages, but please let me know if you find anything that’s broken.
Oh, and just to head off some obvious comments – yes, I’m using a blog engine that is built in PHP, not Perl. My operating system isn’t written in Perl, nor is my web browser or, indeed, most of the software I use from day to day. It would be great if there was a powerful and popular blogging engine written in Perl. But there isn’t, so I’m using this instead.
Warning: It’s likely that I’m going to spend some time playing around until I find a theme that I like. This site is likely to look different every time you visit over the coming weeks.
I heard (my friend is looking for blog engine to install) that some move from WordPress to Movable Type, because WordPress is easy to hack, but Movable Type is not.
I really like WordPress. I think they’ve really figured out how to make it easy for normal people to use themes, widgets, and extra features. We use it for The Effective Perler and are quite happy with it. I really prefer things I don’t have to hack. 🙂
That’s not to say that a Perl engine couldn’t do that, but that people just haven’t done it with Perl. Most of the magic is HTML or Javascript they produce. The PHP portions still look really scary, but I guess a Template Toolkit file to do the same thing would look equally frightening.
After sticking with Movable Type on my own blog for years, I’m also at a point where switching to WordPress is starting to look like a good idea. I like to update the look & feel every now and again but doing that in MT is about as much fun as punching yourself in the face.
What about Melody, a community fork of Movable Type?
Oh, I know all about Melody. I’m watching with interest and I’ll try out their first release when it appears in the next month or so. But it’s going to be some time until they have a community to rival WordPress’s.
I really like WordPress, for all the reasons you’ve listed. There are a lot of people in the Perl community who bash PHP, but to me, that’s no better than people who mindlessly bash Perl.
The only test of whether a language is worthwhile or not is: can people produce useful, quality applications with it? For the top 10-20 languages, the answer is obviously ‘yes’, or they wouldn’t be the top 10-20 languages.
It doesn’t mean you have to like a language, but implying that people who use it are stupid is just plain wrong.