A Comparison of WordPress, MovableType and TextPattern - Article Summary
Vinnie Garcia has a detailed review of WordPress, TextPattern, and MovableType, three of the most popular "advanced" blog CMS (Content Management System) packages, over at Australian publisher SitePoint's website (link at the end of this entry).
This two page article does get into a bit of geek lingo, but for the most part, non-programmer bloggers should have no problem following along. It's an important article to read, especially if you haven't yet selected a platform, or are not happy with your current blogging platform.
Here is a summary of Vinnie's article: WordPress is the easiest to install; MovableType is the most portable; and WordPress has the best rating for "support community", followed by a tie for second place for MovableType and TextPattern. Vinnie also has a link to an article called "The Blogger's Primer", by Aaron Brazell (links below).
I've used both WordPress and MovableType in production blogs, and evaluated TextPattern. My personal feeling to date is that WordPress needs a lot of custom tweaking for all but the most basic setup. For the MovableType blog I write, I did not configure the setup; I simply use the interface to write and post entries. TextPattern is a platform that I initially liked better than WordPress, although it is difficult to explain why. It just seemed to have a rich feature set, yet seemed cleaner in implementation.
That said, my favourite blogging client, Zoundry's BlogWriter software, has a future support for TextPattern (which I'm supposed to help beta-test but have unfortunately been too busy to). I haven't yet come across blogging client support for the TextPattern interface, but that doesn't mean it isn't out there.
Overall, I still prefer Blogger.com's interface (with my own domain names) for it's simplicity, but am leaning towards a very customized version of WordPress for multiple blogs that I'm trying to develop. [Actually, it'll be developed with Morfik.com
Links: SitePoint, review of WordPress, TextPattern, and MovableType, The Blogger's Primer, WordPress, MovableType, TextPattern.
(c) Copyright: 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/
This two page article does get into a bit of geek lingo, but for the most part, non-programmer bloggers should have no problem following along. It's an important article to read, especially if you haven't yet selected a platform, or are not happy with your current blogging platform.
Here is a summary of Vinnie's article: WordPress is the easiest to install; MovableType is the most portable; and WordPress has the best rating for "support community", followed by a tie for second place for MovableType and TextPattern. Vinnie also has a link to an article called "The Blogger's Primer", by Aaron Brazell (links below).
I've used both WordPress and MovableType in production blogs, and evaluated TextPattern. My personal feeling to date is that WordPress needs a lot of custom tweaking for all but the most basic setup. For the MovableType blog I write, I did not configure the setup; I simply use the interface to write and post entries. TextPattern is a platform that I initially liked better than WordPress, although it is difficult to explain why. It just seemed to have a rich feature set, yet seemed cleaner in implementation.
That said, my favourite blogging client, Zoundry's BlogWriter software, has a future support for TextPattern (which I'm supposed to help beta-test but have unfortunately been too busy to). I haven't yet come across blogging client support for the TextPattern interface, but that doesn't mean it isn't out there.
Overall, I still prefer Blogger.com's interface (with my own domain names) for it's simplicity, but am leaning towards a very customized version of WordPress for multiple blogs that I'm trying to develop. [Actually, it'll be developed with Morfik.com
Links: SitePoint, review of WordPress, TextPattern, and MovableType, The Blogger's Primer, WordPress, MovableType, TextPattern.
(c) Copyright: 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/
