As blogs and blogging becomes more and more popular, you’ll be expected to be able to build blogs for your clients from scratch. Using services like TypePad and Blogger just wont cut it. So that leaves you, the web developer, two mainstream options, WordPress or Movable Type for pre-built blogging software. Since I have worked with both now, I figured I would give you the benefits of each platform and my overall opinion.
Let’s start with Movable Type, the software I’m running this blog on and the blogs I use for my classes. Movable Type has been around longer than WordPress, long enough where at one point it was the only choice in blogging software. The biggest advantage Movable Type had (which WordPress MU does as well now) was supporting multiple blogs from one login/admin page. This made it easy for me to maintain three blogs, on different domains, from one place. The other advantage is the ease in which you can manipulate the themes. With WordPress, the novice doesn’t exactly know what files do what, what the css controls, etc. With Movable Type, when you log in to the control panel, you are presented with a list of all the pages and you edit them from the web browser which makes it much easier to manipulate existing themes. Also, it much easier to build custom themes, because Movable Type is a Perl based software (WordPress is PHP based). So adding all the blogs entries to a page with Movable Type is as simple as adding the following code:
<mt:Entries lastn="10" offset="$pagination_offset"> <$mt:Include module="Entry Summary"$> </mt:Entries> <mt:Include module="Pagination">
While trying to read it may not make any sense, you don’t have to understand it. Simply cut and paste it where ever you want your blog entries to show up.
To do the same thing with WordPress (again, PHP based) you will need to paste the following code into three different files to display your blog entries.
<div id=”box”>
<?php if(have_posts()) : ?><?php while(have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<div class=”post”>
<h3><a href=”<?php the_permalink(); ?>”><?php the_title(); ?></a></h3>
<div class=”entry”>
<?php the_content(); ?>
<p class=”postmetadata”>
<?php _e(‘Filed under:’); ?> <?php the_category(‘, ‘) ?> <?php _e(‘by’); ?> <?php the_author(); ?><br />
<?php comments_popup_link(‘No Comments »’, ’1 Comment »’, ‘% Comments »’); ?> <?php edit_post_link(‘Edit’, ‘ | ‘, ”); ?></p>
</div>
</div>
<?php endwhile; ?>
<div class=”navigation”>
<?php posts_nav_link(); ?>
</div>
<?php endif; ?>
</div>
To me, it makes more sense to have to paste a smaller block of code ONCE, not a longer block of code THREE times. This isn’t a one time example, Movable Type is based on “Modules” that perform all kinds of tasks. You don’t have to understand what the code does, you just simply put it where you want comments to show up, authors to show up, dates, etc. With WordPress, there is a lot more thinking involved.
Well, while I think Movable Type is way easier to design and customize, it loses out in a lot of ways to WordPress. To start out with the most obvious to your clients, the WordPress blogging interface is much more user friendly. Just about anyone who can write an email can take a look at the WordPress control panel and figure out how to make a blog entry. With Movable Type, making a post is easy, but it sure looks complicated and you might want to have a training session with your clients to help offset less friendly interface. Another benefit to WordPress is the amount of third party plugins available. You can make WordPress post to Twitter and Facebook the same time you post to your blog, you can make WordPress interact with Flickr, Amazon and just about anything you can imagine. I even found a plugin for WordPress that will let you turn your posts into interactive quizzes. While Movable Type does have a lot of plugins, they are Perl based (not PHP based) and it’s not as common of a web programming language so there will never be as many Perl programmers as PHP programmers. Oh, and don’t get me started on the iPhone App for WordPress. You can take pictures with your iPhone, upload them to your blog and put them in a post all from your phone. Movable Type doesn’t have an iPhone App yet.
So overall, I’m personally going to switch to WordPress. With all the plugins and mobile web authoring options available to WordPress, it makes it worthwhile to fight the steeper learning curve for building custom themes in WordPress. And to help you learn how to first understand and then build your own themes for WordPress, I found a good online tutorial that does a good job of breaking down the functions and showing you how to manipulate them. Just follow this link!