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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.