Okay, I know I’m cutting against the grain here but I’m going to migrate back to Movable Type after dabbling with WordPress for a few months. Yes, the installation of WordPress is easier. Yes it’s nice not to have to rebuild pages all the time. The WordPress skins are good but I don’t really have an overwhelming urge to change the look-and-feel of my site every week (heh – or every 5 years).
So why I am returning to Movable Type? The principle reason is entry, comment, and category management. I find these tasks to be incredibly tedious with WordPress. That doesn’t mean that the interface isn’t showing promise. WordPress has some very attractive and innovative features.
Still, I find Movable Type to be far simpler in terms of editing, layout, includes, etc. I vastly prefer the module include system of Movable Type over the php includes of WordPress. And as a Perl programmer familiar with the Template Toolkit System, Movable Types templating system makes much more intuitive sense to me than the egregious PHP functions of WordPress. Personally, I hate PHP. It’s just pure nastiness.
And I have to admit that I find touches like the “Howdy, [user]” to just be needlessly tacky and unprofessional. It’s like inserting expletives in preliminary draft of a manuscript and then forgetting to remove them.
The rebuilding of pages and includes can become incredibly irritating with Movable Type. To minimize this, I do all of my prototyping offline and build a single static design. From there, I can easily break it out into modules and templates as necessary.