As I mentioned “earlier”:http://yergler.net/blog/archives/2004/05/14/comments-spam-and-dollars, the proliferation of spam comments and the flap over “Movable Type’s”:http://movabletype.org new licensing scheme motivated me to search out other blogging software. As I looked around, my two favorites were “TextPattern”:http://www.textpattern.com and “WordPress”:http://wordpress.org. Given the title of this post, you can probably guess which one I chose.
It took me a couple hours this morning, but I managed to wrangle my MT entries into WordPress, and even got my templates mostly working. I initially evaluated WP 1.02, the latest release, but decided to live on the edge and actually use the current release candidate of 1.2. Overall, it’s very impressive. What have I gained over Movable Type?
* an improved, stream-lined editting interface that doesn’t require multiple windows for assigning more than one category
* a template system that doesn’t rely on magic tags, but rather exploits the power of the underlying language (in this case PHP); this might not seem like a lot, but it’s allowed me to recreate parts of MT that WordPress doesn’t provide an interface for (like template “blocks”)
* templates that live on the filesystem, which makes editting and back up a lot easier
* oh yeah, and it’s really, really Free. “Mark Pilgrim”:http://diveintomark.org has an excellent “post”:http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/05/14/freedom-0 on this very subject, and when smart people agree with me, I feel better.
So why not TextPattern? I have to admit, I was initially drawn to the clean lines and good looks of it’s user interface. Yet somehow, even after reading the license and seeing that it allowed redistribution, I didn’t feel good about it. And then I read “this page”:http://forum.textpattern.com/viewtopic.php?id=505 in the TextPattern forum, and realized that if I chose TP, it’d be MT all over again: free enough for now, not free enough forever.