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.

Here’s a useful tutorial on future proofing the irritating stub-based URLs of movable type (and many blogging systems).

Just stumbled across this movable type Perl plugin that allows Perl code to be placed and executed in templates during rebuilds. Now THIS is something that could come in handy.