Ever since the last time Word Press pushed yet another security update I’ve been looking around at alternatives. I was reading a bit about Movable Type that was brought up, I think, during Bar Camp…specifically some of the stuff in Movable Type 3.2.
The junk folder stuff is most interesting to me. For the past several months I’ve been running comment moderation to cut down on comment spam. While this has been wonderful at keeping spam off my blog, it’s a very manual process to weed out real comments from spam comments. If the junk filtering in Movable Type is in anyway comparable to junk mail filters in my mail clients, that could be a major help to me. I could filter most of the spam while allowing real comments through without the moderation penalty.
In addition, the upgrade steps for Movable Type look MUCH easier than upgrading Word Press. No, “copy these files here, delete those files, unpack your tarball, hit a URL”, etc. From the demo, it looks like you simply upload a few files, refresh the UI, click a button and you’re done.
One of the major reasons I originally chose Word Press over Movable Type was that there was no limit on how many blogs I could create using Word Press (sadly, if you want a second blog you have to have a completely seperate instance…but you CAN do it). But now with 3.2, Movable Type is removing the old restrictions on the blog count. It may be that I have to set up a Movable Type instance to play around with for a little bit.
Moveable Type did itself in for me when it somehow horked itself in a way that stopped it from working and left me with no way to export the content or continue to use it.
It’s almost enough to drive me to just write my own software. WordPress and MT have lots of features, but most of what I actually want in blogging software is still not very complicated and I basically don’t care about the availability of 3rd party plugins.
–Ken
I’ve considered writing my own as well, but then I remember all the work I have to do at my job and the 3-4 side projects I’m trying to get finished as well.
Plus once you install Movable Type you’re going to need to create MT modules to enable seamless integration between Y! Web Services APIs and MT.