Good Time

…

Over the years I have used various blogging platforms, and never found one I was completely happy with, even ones I designed myself. I always felt ’something was missing.” It was as if I was being forced to use a Windows based platform when I knew there was something better out there — my Mac.

Having used MT3 on a visit to a colleagues office, I was immediately smitten.Maybe this is THE blogging platform I have been looking for.

I had a major no-commercial project in the pipeline which would involve a need for numerous blogs on our own servers so I decided to wait until MT4 was available before I switched over to it.

I read all the reviews, followed all the pre launch beta testing comments and marketing hype with anticipation, and finally took the plunge and downloaded MT4 this week.

I am no whiz at the technical side of server management, but I would consider myself a bit more technically savvy than the average man/woman who would wish to use MT4.

Here are the results to date of my attempts to get up and running with MT4 out of the box.

Ran MT system check on server. Server returned as having all the necessary requirements and being OK for running an installation of MT4.

Set up a MySQL database (DBD::mysql & DBI.pm perl modules ) for MT use.

I uploaded Movable type via FTP to the server using my Mac ftp client. (Fetch)

MT4 setup wizard said that as server will not allow it to run from cgi_bin. directory it had to go in other directory. I moved it.

I then had to change all the necessary permissions on .cgi files to 755 so they executed.

This got the MT installer wizard to start. The wizard then told me that one of the MT Folders ( mt-static) had to be put outside the main MT folder so it could be on accessible webpath to run.

However, no matter where I put it, the wizard could not find it, even though the web path address to it is correct. ( I can find it by putting webpath url in browser and get “mt-static OK” message )

I then tried editing the mt-config.cgi file. This did not work either.

I have a much better than the average server hosting account with one of the top providers in Europe. ( Unlimited number of domains/unlimited domain size/unlimited data transfer with full access and control)

The current thought — according to a Server support engineer — as to why MT4 will not install properly was that.

“MT was trying to connect to server through Port 80 which is dis-allowed”.

End result? I still do not have MT4 to use. But I am not — yet — fully disheartened. I have now ordered a “paid for” installation from MT4.

This will make it an expensive “free” solution, but if my expectations are realised it will be worth it. Watch this space

This looks promising, but hardly enough to beat Wordpress (or ExpressionEngine which is arguably better than both of these)…

With all due respects we’ll have to agree to disagree.

Regards

Michele

with all due respects I don’t think you are informed. the only optimization you need is wp cache. this will give you the biggest bang for your buck and is what wordpress.com uses on their blogs.

Wordpress scales very well and is the best blogging platform there is. I wish you luck with movable type.

I find all of this fanboy rivalry to be a fun distraction, when it’s conducted in the spirit of good fun, but when it gets nasty, at which point it’s merely tiresome, and even, as Hamlet wondered about Gertrude, if “they doth protest too much.”

Competition is good. I’m sure anyone who’s had to endure life using software that’s produced in a space that’s not competitive would agree. As Anil Dash has pointed much more eloquently than I could, when a market is growing like blogging and social media, it’s not a zero sum game. Both Automattic and Six Apart could build very successful, lucrative businesses.

WP is great for managing a single blog. At the same time, MT is a very attractive option to businesses looking to integrate it with their existing infrastructure (LDAP, etc.) or wanting to manage multiple blogs through a single interface (WordPress MU seems to handle this in a different, more complex way).

WordPress is great at what it does – but so is Movable Type. There’s room for both.

I don’t doubt that it gets more traffic than I do, but I would guess that it’s running on more than one machine and that the system has been heavily optimised using multiple techniques.

Regards

Michele

Movable Type, eine der bekanntesten Blogging-Plattformen, steht ab sofort final in Version 4.0 zum Download bereit.Wie schon Anfang Juni angekündigt, ist Movable Type nun Open-Source und somit kostenl……

Six Apart released Movable Type 4 today in what is a radical departure from their previous version, 3.3(5). I will be basing my blog reboot on this software, and have been playing around with the beta a little for the……

> “The bug comparison doesn’t really hold too much water though, as any open source software is going to have seemingly more “bugs”. It’s the nature of the beast. When you put the source code out there for anyone to grab, more bugs get reported quicker, and there are continual patches.”

The bug comparison absolutely holds water. MT’s code is as open (as in readable and auditible by anyone) as WordPress. Bugs are found in the MT code over time by the community, but not at the frequency or severity of what Michele is referring to that constant releases are that necessary. From my experience this is the result of a fairly extensive unit testing framework[1] and having a full-time QA staff doing testing in addition to the testing of the community before any final release. Yes, there are bugs like any software package (nothing would ever ship otherwise), but they are normally manageable fringe cases that are generally known before shipping.

[1] Does WordPress do unit tests? I can’t find any information on this and support threads like one leads me to believe that there isn’t: http://wordpres...rt/topic/123418

The bugs analogy is rubbish – Apache is open source and has far fewer security bugs.

Scalability of WordPress is only an issue when you aren’t using the proper setup/plugins/caching – which is true of any software (including MT).

It is true that MT does scale well due to it’s static HTML output, whereas Wordpress continues to hit the database multiple times for every page view because the content is dynamic.

The bug comparison doesn’t really hold too much water though, as any open source software is going to have seemingly more “bugs”. It’s the nature of the beast. When you put the source code out there for anyone to grab, more bugs get reported quicker, and there are continual patches. That’s not even mentioning anything about the user base being magnitudes larger so there are more eyes on the source code and more sites running it for attackers to target. There are bound to be more security flaws discovered for that reason alone. I guess we’ll see what happens when MT moves to open source.

Here’s an example Russian sleaze marketing illegal Viagra and phishing scams on techcrunch.com .

http://www.tech...p-the-mash-ups/

or
http://search.y...&fr=sexp-rd

Wordpress does not scale as well as MT and probably never will.

In the past 18 months I’ve lost track of the number of security issues that Wordpress has had, while I think I’ve only had to install one minor security update for MT 3.*

I think the article may have confused people regarding extensions and plugins. You can extend MT without paying for stuff, though there will be paid extensions available as well – the same is true with a lot of OSS software.

Regards from Ireland

Michele