Movable Type — Now Open Source, Plays Catchup to WordPress
Movable Type has gone open source. It’s the only way they’ll compete with the rapidly-improving WordPress. Yeah, WP is sloppy and freewheeling at times (oy, I’m working with bbPress and it’s far from ready for primetime) but it’s a lot more nimble and there are plugins and capable and helpful users in forums up the wazoo — that’s tech-speak for “there are many competent technicians”.
I’ve been with WordPress since it was b2. I’ve tinkered with Movable Type. I’ve agonized through MT’s compiles. I came to the conclusion about 18 months ago that few new blogs should go the route of MT over WP but that existing installs, especially professional sites, certainly didn’t need to do a tear-down.
WordPress is PHP-based and MT is PERL-based, if that matters to you or your tech staff. Background. I live eat and breathe MySQL databases and HTML and I haven’t needed to manipulate text much since my days doing pattern matching for an art museum back in the late 1980’s, so PHP is my preference.
The wisdom of MT going open-source is good for MT and good for its client base and good for all of us. It means that more people will be contributing plugins, more will be testing, and it will be come a more secure and robust product. Competition is good.
Prediction: 2008 will probably be a banner year for script-kiddies hammering MT political sites. If you’re running MT and you’ve got anything controversial, make sure your webmaster and your web host is up on security measures. If you’ve been running MT and are happy with it, make sure it’s current and there’s no reason to change. If you’re on the fence and need to develop something soon, I’d go with WordPress until the dust settles and the first few waves of script kiddie mischief have been managed by the MT folk.
No doubt, like the early days of the WordPerfect and Microsoft Word wars, there will soon be open source conversion utilities allowing your new site to be morphed into the latest superior open source content management system.
And let’s not kid ourselves… it’s far beyond blogging software now.
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December 13th, 2007 at 1:51 pm
I am trying to understand why you believe this will result in an influx of security attacks against MT blogs?
Nothing changes, the MT source has always been out there, free for anyone to see and use, this isn’t a technical change, you dont get code you didnt have before - and therefore were harder to attack - its a license change nothing else.