kartooner

The fol­low­ing is a reply I sent to Brian Camp­bell, who con­tacted me in regards to my opin­ion of Word­Press and other CMS/blogging engines. My inten­tion was to answer as hon­estly and open-ended as pos­si­ble, and more impor­tantly explain in-depth my fas­ci­na­tion of WordPress.

I used MT from Jan­u­ary 2003 until this month (May 2004) when, after hear­ing about Word­Press, I decided to give it a shot. The install was pain­less (actu­ally eas­ier and more stream­lined than MT in my opin­ion) and import­ing my 300+ entries was a no-brainer, I reit­er­ate; no muss and no fuss. Know­ing PHP is a nice advan­tage to using Word­Press since with that knowl­edge you could poten­tially incor­po­rate new fea­tures, but in all hon­esty I’m not an expert in PHP and only know the basics, if that. Word­Press doesn’t expect you to know PHP, which is why Matt and the team of WP devel­op­ers have made it user-friendly to the point where links are cre­ated via a Link Man­ager (in addi­tion to Sub­cat­e­gories) and other aspects of tweak­ing your site can be accom­plished lit­er­ally at the click of a button.

The Wiki (wiki.wordpress.org) is a com­pre­hen­sive, and might I add com­mu­nity con­tributed man­ual of sorts. You can eas­ily find all of the WP Tags, which should be noted are not sim­i­lar to Movabletype’s tags. WordPress’s tags are PHP-orientated by nature, but it’s just a mat­ter of cut­ting and past­ing the tag into the core of your tem­plate. Which brings me to one of the more impres­sive fea­tures of WP (and Textpat­tern); the uti­liza­tion of only one main tem­plate. That’s right, there is no need for addi­tional tem­plates (apart from the com­ments sub-template) like Indi­vid­ual and Date-based archives like there are for MT to function.

Another nice fea­ture, and the one I favor the most, are the dynam­i­cally gen­er­ated pages. In Mov­able­type all of the out­put is gen­er­ated via sta­tic pages and rebuild­ing (espe­cially for a larger site with a thou­sand entries or more) can be a slow process and put a lot of weight on your server. WP, on the other hand, dynam­i­cally gen­er­ates each page via a mod_rewrite (geek speek for a server-side rewrit­ing engine with the abil­ity to rewrite requested URLs on the fly). The advan­tage of this is that every­thing is much quicker and say you need to change the perma­links in the future (oth­er­wise known as the indi­vid­ual link for each entry) you can eas­ily do this with­out redun­dant rebuilds because the pages in WP are not static.

WP and Textpat­tern are open source. Expres­sion Engine and Mov­able Type are not and will never be. This means not hav­ing to pay for the soft­ware, but, more impor­tantly it means a much stronger grass­roots com­mu­nity. Just look at Open Source projects like Mozilla Fire­fox and Miranda-IM.

These devel­op­ers are funded through gen­er­ous dona­tions from their users. This means, like Mark Pil­grim or Eric Meyer (who both use Word­Press), you could donate what­ever you feel and not ever have to feel guilty over licens­ing issues. Speak­ing for Open Source devel­op­ers; accept­ing dona­tions and gar­ner­ing sup­port from the com­mu­nity means your prod­uct will endure longevity and fea­tures will amass because the devel­op­ers and com­mu­nity are psy­ched for the soft­ware; they want to see it flourish.