Hosted blogging platforms have come of age. Next generation blogging platforms are getting more agile, plug-and-play compatible via 100s of modules, scalable over millions of users, socially networked with more community features, and more user friendl…

As an international user, my most annoyance against WP is Matt’s blatant discrimination against international users. Though I won’t be directly hurt if the concerned change is backed out, this simple message tells Matt’s mindset clearly. Not to mention, no translation is ever bundled with WP, and default theme translation is absolutely forbidden to enter official code repository, all because of “simplicity”, which means international users are completely unimportant. Although there are others in WP core team who care, and a person is added to WP team to coordinate I18N effort a few months ago, they can only do the best within what their power allows.

And for Matt’s manner, I suppose quite some people here may have already known his classic example of default ruling of Browserhappy stuff. Just a tip of iceberg.

Criticism put aside, I think constructive comment works better for everybody. If MT does well in I18N area, resolving I18N issues in tagging, line wrap of CJK text, RTL support, rendering broken multibyte text (notorious for any PHP software), MT can get a big advantage in terms of user base, which would be so much bigger than solely relying on English-speaking users in the upcoming few years. Granted, WP is still leading in I18N area, particularly when many newer blogging software has almost non-existant or fake I18N support. All others need to catch up if they want to win the heart of other half of the world.

Oh, btw, am glad that I still run the same blog on TypePad as well, although their admin tool is far from being user friendly.

So, a mild case of pox on both of their houses!

I was a very happy WP user who spent a lot of time in their support forums trying to help folks. I know see how much of a pain Matt is and how much he disrespects those who volunteers or in fact are drafted into helping. A comment up above is made about the large community of WP developers out there. It’s a lot smaller group now a days since Matt has chased scores of them away. Matt’s poor manners, lack of ethics, his history of flat out lying to folks, never answering email or questions posed to him, Toni’s lack of follow through and unwillingness to actually manage his employees, etc. is what drove away this wp user. Two years ago I hosted over 900 wordpress blogs on our servers. Today it’s down to less than a hundred. We’ve moved them all over to MT and Serendipity now as well as banned Akismet from the boxes as well. We have Matt to thank for that.

Every time one of these “disagreements” occur, Matt runs out his fanboys to come to his defense. It’s a pity that he can’t or won’t just stop and see the whole picture instead of just seeing it his own way.

What is to stop them from charging again? Nothing.

The GNU General Public License, that’s what. It’s the same thing that prevents Automattic from pulling the carpet out from underneath WordPress users. The normal upgrade route for bloggers seems to be to upgrade away from MT3.3 commercial to Movable Type Open Source, which is purely GPL. Once it goes under GPL, they cannot un-GPL that version that they’ve released. If they tried to fight that, you’d have 800lb gorillas like Red Hat on your side filing court briefs and possibly funding you to fight them in court.

I continue to seek out other blog systems but keep coming back to WordPress. I have tried more CMS/blog platforms than I can remember on my home webserver (GeekLog, phpNuke, Serendipity, PivotLog, b2 evolution, Drupal, Mambo, Nucleus to name a few). Each one has its strengths and weaknesses. The absolute best thing about WordPress is its robust user, support and developer community. People here have talked about how hard it is to create a plugin or a theme. Well, I’ve created many of both. I didn’t have to, but I enjoy the coding process. The reason I didn’t have to is that one can search the plugin repository or the theme repository and find literally dozens of items that will satisfy any conditions I choose to set. I don’t NEED to code anything, I just have to find something I like that’s already been done and install it; much like I would with Windows programs.

Plugins are not necessarily better or worse, but I can’t imagine a small company out performing an entire community of users whose contributions are made in the form of plugins. Also, plugins let the users direct the software, allowing them to get everything they want, provided they can implement it.

The thing is, Movable Type is generally a breeze to develop for. I wrote a full-fledged news reader application on top of Movable Type. It was about as easy to write as any J2EE program I’ve written for work, if not easier. MT is an amazingly productive environment for software engineers to work in.

That’s possible, but no excuse for them to turn away from Movable Type Open Source. It’s a purely open source branch of Movable Type released under the GPL.

To each their own, but don’t kid yourselves. WordPress is very sorely lacking in developer features. If all you’ve ever done is some PHP, you will probably never appreciate things like Movable Type’s built in ORM capabilities, and the fact that it properly separates out event-handling code from the user interface, allowing you to use pure markup for your interface, and just hook Perl code in behind the scenes. Nearly every aspect of the CMS is exposed through fairly object-oriented code.

Movable Type, not Moveable Type

Maybe they should just GoogleFight it out:
http://tinyurl.com/2yawfr

I had a conversation with photo frmaeslast year, and he explained that one of the reasons he stays with Movable Type is that he is an expert with it — makes sense.