Six Apart has recently decided that the best way to win back customers fleeing their platforms is to target WordPress, which is a new strategy they call competing. (What have they been doing the past 7 years?) A good example is this exchange between a commenter on Valleywag and Byrne Reese, the lead developer of Movable Type:
Sundown: “@anildash: what part of WordPress is not open source?”
byrnereese: “@Sunnduwn – I think that is a question better asked of Automattic. Anil, and certainly not Six Apart, has never been briefed, nor has anyone for that matter been presented with an accounting of what is open and closed source at Automattic.”
Okay, here’s some accounting:
WordPress is 100% open source, GPL.
All plugins in the official directory are GPL or compatible, 100% open source.
bbPress is 100% GPL.
WordPress MU is 100% open source, GPL, and if you wanted you could take it and build your own hosted platform like WordPress.com, like edublogs.org has with over 100,000 blogs.
There is more GPL stuff on the way, as well. 🙂
Could you build Typepad or Vox with Movable Type? Probably not, especially since people with more than a few blogs or posts say it grinds to a halt, as Metblogs found before they switched to WordPress.
Automattic (and other people) can provide full support for GPL software, which is the single license everything we support is under. Movable Type has 8 different licenses and the “open source” one doesn’t allow any support. The community around WordPress is amazing and most people find it more than adequate for their support needs.
Movable Type, which is Six Apart’s only Open Source product line now that they’ve dumped Livejournal, doesn’t even have a public bug tracker, even though they announced it going OS over 9 months ago!
I had held off criticizing them after they went OS and before they decided to start an all-out confrontation because that’s not generally what OS projects do to each other.
For as long as I can remember the WordPress about page has linked and thanked Movable Type for ideas and inspiration.
Movable Type once led the market, it had over 90% marketshare in the self-hosted market. Now they call “pages” and “dynamic publishing”, features WordPress has had for 4+ years, innovation and you still can’t do basic things like click “next posts” at the bottom of home page.
For the record, I’m glad they’ve taken the license of MT in a positive direction that prevents them from betraying their customers like they did with MT3, but they have a long way to go before the project could be considered a community.
WordPress did 3 major releases last year, we’ll do 3 major releases this year. Along the way thousands of people will contribute, as well as every employee of Automattic. What we build will be greater than the sum of its parts because we’ve been a community and open source from the beginning, and always will be.
Matt, you summed up everything the right way. I couldn’t agree more!
Thanks for publically rebuffing Six Apart!
IMHO, there are also a few things I don’t like about Movable Type either:
– Installation isn’t as easy as WordPress. Installing a Movable Type blog requires some skill.
– The support of the WordPress community is amazing with professional WordPress users doing whatever they can to help the new lesser knowledgeable users (and it’s free!).
– The theme support is just amazing, as there are new themes being released every day.
– You can use WordPress as a CMS and host multiple blogs without worrying about licensing fees.
Oh, there is just so much to say and it would take days to weeks!
Thanks again for WordPress! I’ve used it ever since b2 and I’ve had so many opportunities to switch but I’m always lured back to WordPress!
“pity comes without charge, envy wants to be earned..” 😉
Open source license without allowing support is like saying: we are parents — but we had never ever had children — it is illogical and nonsense.
Matt, I think what they were trying to attack is akismet (as it requires an API key). Though the plug-in for it is GPL’d as well and well documented. And, even that doesn’t really matter as akismet is a plug-in not an integrated part of the WordPress core so it’s a moot point.
Matt.
WordPress is the best. Stop paying attention to the criticisms. They will surely come. When you pay attention, you are making Movable Type more important than it seems. You are making it sound like it is a head-on rival with WordPress which obviously and gratefully is not. WordPress is light years better.
Period.
P.S. My WPMU site is coming soon.
Sometimes you look back at when you chose between WP and MT for your first blog, and you just have to smile that you chose WP…
This post was one of those times. The community behind WP is incredible, and practically guarantees that no matter what happens, WP will still be going strong for at least the next few years. 🙂
o_O
If you’re both open-source, shouldn’t you be sharing ideas to make the world a better place, not attacking each other? 😐
Good to see you fighting for WordPress Matt, seems jealousy is eating away at a few people. Your success is deserved and wordpress as open source is the best thing that happened the internet in years!
George, I agree! I had joined their chat channel and answered questions and volunteered advice when asked. I pointed out bugs on their site, like a copyright in their site footer years out of date, privately to Byrne. A day or two before their post I shook hands with David Recordon and Anil Dash.
If they’re approaching it like a zero-sum game though, I think it our responsibility to put our point of view out there and defend the values, integrity, and community of WordPress.
That said, it’s a waste of both of our time, which is why I was surprised to see them put such a provocative post out there that required a response.
Wow, I guess all this talk about competition struck a nerve.
Michael, we’ve competed for years! I do understand where you’re coming from though, if I was in your position I might try to do the same.
I’ve seen these comments lately throughout the web and have to say that MT are full of idiots in my opinion. I had to use MT for a client once and I SWEAR I will never use it again. It was horrible to configure, edit, ect.
I’ll stick to wordpress thank you 🙂
When I read Anil’s “article” yesterday I couldn’t help but think how classless it was. Any time someone resorts to taking shots at a competing product rather than glorifying their own, I read it as desperation.
As a php developer I’d used my own home rolled blog for seven years before I decided to port it to WordPress just over a year ago. In the space of 24 hours I had a WordPress blog set up with all my content intact and when I needed help I found it on the support forums. In short, it was a breeze and I’ve never looked back.
*That* is the spirit of open source, and I thank yourself and the good folk at Automattic for preserving that spirit.
Oh SNAP.
I really do want to see MT succeed. I found the titling of their entry both cheeky and also a tiny bit sinister, because Google is gonna reward that one pretty highly.
I think that competition is going to make the marketplace better. I am glad that MT and 6A push the marketplace forward in some very important ways. WordPress is a better product because 6A exists. But nothing about this incident has changed my mind about using one or the other, and it’s made me a bit sad for both. I always felt like Matt and Anil were pretty cordial, and I’m afraid that, at least for the moment, they aren’t. 🙁
Wow Matt, very well said. Also thanks for giving us a basic overview as to what is GPL’ed and what is not, I’ve been wondering that since the last episode or two of WordPress Weekly.
I always thought it was strange to see Movable Type mentioned on the about page but your reasoning for doing so really does add to the honesty of the WordPress project.
Very inspiring post. Go Matt! I’ve been always a little confused by why MT is still popular in Japan (or at least looks like so).
Matt
About 12 months ago, I was left in a quandry, I purchased a license for a CMS platform years earlier, yet had not one update in 5 years, so I was forced to move or continue paying 1000’s of dollars in fees each year.
I had 3 developers each work on one of a selected 3 platforms which were Movable Type, WordPress and Expression Engine.
With Moveable Type, but we found that nothing would or could work with that platform, and it was a quick decision to get off and continue with the two others.
Expression Engine was lovely but it lacked what we needed to be able to quickly deploy and extend our offerings.
WordPress on the other hand has been amazing, yes we made some mistakes and yes it has only a few limitations, but the features and community support won us over quickly.
We have now developed some 40 real estate agent websites in 4 months.
With out previous system it would take at least 3 weeks for each site, we have invested heavily in building plug-ins but we know we have possibly the greatest platform on this planet to work on and being 100% open source, with amazing support and a kind of generosity not often seen from a massive community.
So to the WordPress team and community keep up the great work, it is much appreciated and I can assure you that I am one of many companies that will benefit from this software being open source.
Regards Peter
I’m generally not a fan of these public debates, but from what I can see, this post was necessary.
I’ve tried both platforms. Without a doubt, WordPress wins in a K.O.
This is one type of reaction when someone feels threatened and fear is an ugly thing. With the way people have embraced WordPress and the strong third-party development, WordPress is a force the competition cannot ignore. Some will meet you head on and try to build a better product. Others will instead try to cut you down.
The only thing you can really control is yourself and what you do. Do it with honest and integrity Matt.
Hello Matt,
I must agree with you, and I would like to add something about Open Source. Many big corporations see Open Source projects as serious threats to their business and although it is now more than true, many still don’t realize that Open Source IS compatible with commercial activities. Releasing the code of a project and letting a whole community to cooperate is a great way because everyone receives benefits from this.
When Movable Type Open Source was released, I strongly criticized it. I felt disappointed and the main idea, after testing it, was: “Yes, maybe it’s Open Source, but it’s a one-legged open source project”. Later, talking with some bloggers from Spain, we realized that it MT OS is a phantom project. No support, as you well say, and no community. It was like downloading the typical piece of freeware with fancy name and a disclaimer that says “The software is offered with no support”.
I am glad that there is such an open WordPress community. Maybe Movable Type will be able to compete with WordPress when they realize that the Internet nowadays doesn’t work like 10 years ago.
Great article, Matt, and my congratulations to you and all the WordPress team.
Antonio Bustamante
Great run-down, Matt!
Great to be reminded how superior WordPress is to its competition — though I have to admit, that’s a fact which is hard to forget as well!
I’ve never really liked SixApart, mostly for their superior attitude, but also because when I tried to set up my own MT blog it was a nightmare.
It seems they’ve made some serious blunders the past few years with their pricing fiasco and spreading themselves thin with LiveJournal and Vox, so now it’s sour grapes time.
At this point WordPress is a huge success in large part due to its openness and goodwill with developers, two areas that SixApart can’t touch.
Keep on truckin’ Matt!
Sour grapes maybe?
It’s like Opera complain about MS’s IE monopoly yet Firefox has managed to crack around 30% of the market.. quality product = users…
WordPress would have to be one of the most exciting programs that I’ve worked with in a long time and it’s OS!
Keep at ’em Matt 🙂
Sometimes one wishes life could be as easy as IRC: /ignore SixApart
I’ll have to remember to never get on your bad side. 🙂 excellent run down…
All hail Open Source .. truth open source.
I was never really impressed with Moveable Type. Just .. seemed humdrum to me. WordPress almost feels natural …
And if someone is going to say ‘innovative’ it better dag well be innovative and not claim features that others already have had. That’s just .. well, lying!
Which is why people not only use and expand the platform exponentially, but also use WordPress as an OS development model to follow. Thanks for your good work over the years Matt, the community appreciates it.
Six Apart doesn’t really have an excuse for squandering their huge market lead.
in regard to Movable Type:
“and you still can’t do basic things like click “next posts” at the bottom of home page.”
I don’t mean to stand up for anone who bashes WordPress, but actually you can finally do this with MT template tags.
What’s really interesting is how much functionality WP can pack into such a small amount of code. MT is still HUGE by comparison. Not to mention that WP doesn’t require CGI access so it can run alost anywhere on almost any host. Every time I read how simple the MT installation is supposed to be now I laugh. Anyone who has ever installed both WP and MT knows why.
It’s ok Movable Type. WordPress is just a friendlier tool for bloggers.
– JA
Journihilism, I hadn’t seen a MT blog do that yet. Could you point me to the template tags and I’ll update the post with a link? To clarify, I don’t mean “next post | previous post” but “next page | previous page”. (I’ve seen it on Typepad and Vox, but not Movable Type.)
Take it from a seasoned business man of 50 years:
Public criticism from your competitors is the best publicity you can get. When they point out their competitors’ weaknesses it ALWAYS causes people to find the weaknesses in their own products and services and investigate the competitors’ product. Many switch to the competitor.
The moral of the story is: Keep your mouth(and keyboard) shut, and make sure your product is better than theirs by a long shot. The market will decide who is best and score is kept by sales…or users in the case of OS software.
Picking at a competitor, even in retaliation, is always going to hurt you.
I might point out too, OS or not, this is a competitive society. Everybody wants to win, even OS product developers. Sooner or later the typical weak competitive behaviors will surface, such as bashing the competition. The losing side tends to fight first that way. The winners always produce better products. So, from an idealistic point of view, if you want to keep OS purified from such negative behaviors, don’t participate in the behaviors, even in retaliation 🙂
Kudos on WordPress, Great effort!.
I used MT until I couldn’t stand it any longer, and frankly I stayed with it as long as I did because by that time I had no faith that I could find something better. MT had taken away users ability to get help, unless they paid for the product, and I wasn’t going to pay for something that was so problematic.
I’m so glad my friends kept urging me to switch to WP. It’s been a dream to use and any problems I’ve had (mainly figuring out how to tinker a theme to use my own graphic for a background) have been easily answered on the forums at wordpress.org. The users there have been great. So many helpful people, and I believe that is a result of the community that Automattic have created, by a great program, and bending over backwards to help and actually empower users. Raspberries to MT for resorting to sour grapes.
WordPress is being targeted, because it is successful. When it was small and of minor consequence, it was cute, and there is little coup to count in kicking dirt & zinging spitwads at the cute. WordPress becomes steadily greater … and steadily less cute.
It’s just human nature. It’s politics. Attacking WordPress’ Open Source credentials is only the beginning. The larger the role the package plays on the Internet, and ultimately, in world affairs, the more mature & sophisticated the attacks will become.
The Open Source movement was long heavily dominate by those with anti-profit sentiments. It has been an uphill struggle, to convince the Dinosauria that business practices and Open Source can coexist. I would imagine that these aspersions were intended largely for their ears.
WordPress gives it away, source code ‘n all. Ya can hack it from one end to the other. They’ll even give you server-space to practice on! It’ll be tough to get quality-mileage out of the Open Source play.
But gird your loins! The next attack will be better! 😉
From a third-party perspective (arguably the most important, as “they” are the people who use the software, be it WP or MT):
1) The MT.com blog post is cheeky, but not malicious or “dirty” as you put it.
2) You overreacted. Badly. Your comment on MT.com is the digital equivalent of throwing your toys out of the pram. I found it distasteful and unprofessional.
3) Things have now, inevitably, turned into a pissing match (with Arrington jeering you both on from the side lines, rubbing his hands with glee).
4) By far the better response would be to write a proper response to MT, and go over the many advantages WP has to MT, whilst also rebutting some of their claims. A counter-review, if you like. Of course, you can still do this when you launch WP 2.5.
Apologies if this comes across as a telling-off; it certainly wasn’t intended to be. It is simply the honest thoughts of a WP user (who has tried MT) who wants to see WP (and Automattic) fight the good fight.
Well put. At this point I would at least be tempted to “no follow” their link on the WordPress about page 😛
*cheers*
That’s why WordPress is my main ingredient in my cooking of websites, social media campaigns, petitioning software. I find WordPress easy to hack for my needs and quick to deploy. I use other open source CMS software like Drupal but always go back to Drupal.
Thanks Matt for your part in creating this beautiful software and more important for supporting and investing in the WordPress.org community.
gywst
matt, ok, i use wp, i love wp, wp is opensource, but wp is too a company, and the users (your clients) need
Respect and consideration. Movable Type espressed you opinion, when microsotf want buy yahoo google talk too. And wp 2.4 was cancelled for launching whit power 2.5, ¿what happen? No problem man! We are with you.
Honestly, I’d take this as a compliment. If have to resort to pointing out the faults with their competitors rather than just sticking to what’s good about their product, than that may say something in itself.
How can anyone think WordPress is only partially open source when it says “WordPress is an Open Source project” right on the About page?
Matt +1. I’ll need to do a post supporting this. We’re behind you a 100%. Open source stands together — we have lots of other proprietary tech to save people from.
/me goes off looking for that WP patch and thinks about mass hosting and support again….
Thanks Boris, I think the way Drupal and WordPress have co-existed is a great model to follow despite a few distractions along the way, and your role in facilitating that as an ambassador has been crucial. It’s rare for code for one project to be directly applicable to another, but ideas and values are contagious — in the good Isley Brothers way.
You rock! Nice rebuttal.
This is probably the best opensource commitment public act I’ve seen in a while. We all are eager for backpress anyway 🙂
Great.. We will grow with WordPress.
Continue the good work.
keep up the great work Matt – I’m glad WP is OS and I am glad you’ve helped to keep it that way.
Hey Matt,
I just wanted to comment to correct a few things from my own experience. I’ll leave the rest for others who are more involved in the situation.
Could you build Typepad or Vox with Movable Type? Probably not, especially since people with more than a few blogs or posts say it grinds to a halt,
If I had to pick one thing to describe what I have done on a daily basis since leaving Six Apart to work with Enterprise clients, it would be “building large blog networks for very large companies”. I can say without doubt that Movable Type scales incredibly well with far more blogs/entries/comments/etc than most people can ever hope to have in their installations. There certainly was a time when this was not the case, but no release within nearly the last two years fits this description.
Could you build Vox or TypePad with MT? Putting aside the question of why you would want to for a second and the features of each that are not currently found in MT, I would say sure — assuming that you also have the budget to scale it. As you know from your stewardship of WordPress.com, the magic in scaling a dynamic service is very much in the infrastructure.
as Metblogs found before they switched to WordPress.
Having had the pleasure of talking to the MetBlogs guys a number of times over my tenure at Six Apart, I happen to know that MetBlogs was using a very old version of Movable Type. Comparing old version of one software with the latest of another isn’t really a fair or useful comparison.
As I related to one of the MetBlogs team here at SxSW, the timing of their switch is unfortunate given that many of the features which they had asked for and desired for so long actually made it into Movable Type Community Solution. In any case, their new site looks fantastic and I’m happy to see those guys finally get to move forward with software that works for them.
Movable Type, which is Six Apart’s only Open Source product line now that they’ve dumped Livejournal, doesn’t even have a public bug tracker, even though they announced it going OS over 9 months ago!
While I think we (the OS fans and MT developers/users) can all agree with you that sometimes Six Apart moves slower than we’d like, I know how hard they’ve been working on the back end to implement the technical and business infrastructure necessary for an open source (and more importantly dual-licensed) project. One of those things is in fact a public bug tracker.
You can see the progress of that work at http://bugs.movabletype.org/. I believe you have to have an account at the moment to browse the tickets, but submittors can access and track the progress of their own tickets. The bug tracker has already been an incredible boon to MT’s current developers (most of whom have an account if they desired one) and more is to come.
Now they call “pages” and “dynamic publishing”, features WordPress has had for 4+ years, innovation
For the record, Movable Type has supported both static and dynamic publishing for nearly four years as well. I won’t speak for Six Apart, but I doubt that anyone was saying that WordPress didn’t have these very necessary and excellent features. Only that MT 4 has both and that is great for everyone.
and you still can’t do basic things like click “next posts” at the bottom of home page.
Sure you can. Check the box to publish your main index dynamically and then drop in a couple lines of template code for the page navigation. That code uses the current index to show were you are and the specfied offset for the number of entries to display.
Again, this has been possible for nearly four years with MT. It’s just not set up that way by default because the software defaults to static publishing.
Anyhow, having read what was written, I don’t really get the whole brouhaha. Nothing was said that was untrue about Movable Type or WordPress and, aside from the cheeky title, the post spoke much more to me about the pride and excitement the team has in their new version which they wanted to communicate to the world.
All in all, both WordPress and Movable Type are excellent pieces of software which can and do stand on their own. I know you take great pride in your work (as well you should) just as the Movable Type team does.
As I’ve said to you a number of times throughout the years, this Hatfield and McCoy routine does little to advance the interests of either user base and serves mostly to make us all look juvenille.
Just keep up the good work and let’s keep all boats rising.
Jay, it’s obvious why you’re one of the busiest guys in blogging, and your clients are lucky. Thanks for the comments.
About MT Community Solution though, doesn’t that cost 10k+? When they ask you to contact them for pricing that usually means you’re in trouble.
SA sucks (not to bash SA but their customer service really bites) right along with MT. MT does not have a very “people-friendly” interface.
WordPress is more people-friendly & I’ve never had a problem with it that I couldn’t solve.
Keep up the work you’ve been doing. If you do that, you have my full support.
Who ever thought that WP is not Open Source is probably from Mars. 😉
George, they are not both open-source in the same way.
WP is open source because it is its philosophy. MT is open source because ALA needs a marketing gag.
Sometimes a man /woman have to say:this are my limits!
If a man or woman doesn’t do this, they would like to become a cue ball for the others.
And I feel Matts post is something like:he has set his boundaries or the boundarie from Auttomatics.
regards
Monika
We Love It.
All people love it and it is perfect for internationalization also.
@George
When someone throws mud at you, you just cant sit there and wait for them to hit again.
I hate these new marketing schemes adopted by many people, where they just try to show that their competitor is below them.
I’ve used WordPress for years, and will continue to do so. I used WP to teach myself PHP by writing plugins.
Though I can’t say that I’ve used MT, I do know that when I’m having problems with a blog, and I check the source, 9 times of of 10, it’s not WP in the “generator” meta tag.
WWWPD?
“Open Source” suggests a more collaborative development process, which isn’t exactly always the case with wordpress. I have seen a number of very good changes (and fixes for huge performance issues) put forward and shot down or just ignored. Plenty of time spent on tacking on new features, but still many core issues not resolved for various reasons.
In more Open Source environments, those major performance issues would have long since been addressed.
Alex, I’d be really interested in performance improvements. We host 2.6 million WordPress blogs that served 149 million pageviews last week. I’m not aware of any performance issues that aren’t addressed in version 2.5 of WP, but if you know of any send me a note and a link to any Trac tickets you felt didn’t get proper attention.
We will never implement every idea, but I do think everything should get fair consideration.
I wrote a decent pro-WP comment there and the moderators simply refuse to approve it.
In any case, my experiences with MT were horrific. People should stick to WP if they know what’s best for them.
Matt,
You have presented all info briefly & nicely! 🙂
But I personally feel sixparts attack on our community is to gain some exposure by creating controversy. Thats what looser do when they failed to do any good… 😀
Also I am surprised to here talk about updating wordpress as I am gonna do it with just one line…
svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.3.5/
I guess updating is easiest part about wordpress! 😉
About MT Community Solution though, doesn’t that cost 10k+? When they ask you to contact them for pricing that usually means you’re in trouble.
Yeah, I can’t say I’m privvy to their thinking on either the price or the “contact us” step. My assumption (which at least at one point was true) is that the pricing isn’t yet set and hence not published.
Again, from my own experience here, $10K for MTCS+support is not an issue for a very large number of potential customers. In fact, back when I was with the company, this is precisely what they wanted. So, if your customers want something, and they are willing to pay for it, and your investors expect the maximum return, are you not almost obligated to charge that much? I know my wife would kill me if I was working for half of my possible rate and she’s nowhere near as invested in me. 🙂
Anyway, again, I have no insight into their thinking here (or their investors thinking). All I know is my clients want it, and when they get it, they love it. That’s good enough for me.
Good point Jay, I don’t think very many people, particularly corporations, are making a decision about MT vs WP based on price.
Matt, I totally agree with you.
I’ve tried MT several times because of the build-in “multiple-blogs”-functionality – just to remember how clumsy it was every single time. I think SA is taking it in the right direction now and it is always good for users if there are competitors in the same market, but I’ll stay with WordPress (unsing it for… well, a LOT of sites) because of the features, support and of course the great community!
Keep it up!
In Brazil, we love WordPress. MT is nearly zero.
My only request would be to ask that the Akismet plugin clearly identifies itself as being GPL licensed. There’s plenty of direct and indirect references to the plugin being GPL licensed when you search the web, but nothing in the plugin, or it’s distribution makes that explicit. If you could fix that, it’d great =)
James, I’ll add something to the header.
Matt: About MT Community Solution though, doesn’t that cost 10k+?
No. That was a quote given to a particular user for a particular project with particular parameters. Also note that said parameters were not mentioned as part of what led to the quote, which is why that number is doubly misleading. This is equivalent to plainly stating that MT costs $1000 without mentioning that this actually refers specifically to a 20-seat commercial license.
The cost of CS is what you get quoted.
If you’re truly curious, a rate sheet was pasted to the Pronet list in January by someone else who’d requested information. I know Lloyd is subscribed, and I believe I’ve seen you pop up once or twice. It’s not hard to find(though feel free to mail me if you have trouble).
And before anyone asks, I will not republish the information here as there are several reasons it’s probably no longer accurate, and there’s a larger discussion around the costs that needs to be taken in and is not relevant to this actual thread.
Pwnage!
Hi Matt,
I *should* have been at Northern Voice ’08 attending your keynote speech (which I’ve heard, both in person and on the local Vancouver blogosphere, was a total success). Well, to add to the numerous WP followers, I had been urged to move my blog from Blogger to WordPress and I can’t tell you how happy I am! I have just begun posting regularly on WP, so I can’t say much right now about it, but it’s really improved my ability to communicate with my readers, blog directly from Flickr and browse comments.
As I said on one of my most recent posts, I really love WP 🙂 And I am sad I missed out on meeting you in person. Heard that you guys went to Commercial Drive for brunch (I live fairly close by, so I could have indeed dropped by!). Well, it’ll have to wait until next time you’re in Vancouver.
One thing I would like is a free theme with environmental features. My blog (Random Thoughts of a Student of the Environment) looks good with the theme it has now but it’d be nicer if the text was actually green instead of red-ish.
Oh and I concur – don’t give in to blog wars. I have been mulling over whether I should trash a fellow Vancouver blogger whose content just irks me (just a writer with very little content). Luckily, that writer’s blog is NOT on WordPress, so I am hoping the blog’s readership is low (or they’ll just take issue with the content anyway!)
I agree with some of the commentators. Installing MT is a pain in the ass and they do not provide support.
WordPress is just amazing!
Good points Matt.
I frankly found it a bit weird that MT would be concerned with WordPress upgrades and stuff.
They should just focus on improving their system, for the few people that use it.
I really love WP for its friendliness and ease of use. As a web developer I have to test many platforms to choose the best for my customers. And on almost every occasion I end up using WP.
I have tried MT 4.1 (their latest version) once, but removed it from my server after just 2 hours, finding it uninteresting to work with.
As long as Six Apart continues such releases and cannot win users, I think attacks like this one only show how weak they really are.
And WordPress most importantly has an unbeatable simple installation. I still havent figured out how to install MT until today. Been trying to for too long already.
I was an MT user and plugin developer for years until I started playing around with WordPress. Now all of my blogs are on WordPress, and I’ll never go back. When WP 2.3 came out I had to upgrade 7 blogs. Thanks to the magic of an automatic upgrade plugin I was able to do all upgrades, simultaneously, in less than 10 minutes. I would dread every MT upgrade I had to go through. The WP community is vastly better. Everything about it is better. I can’t even imagine going back to Movable Type. And I used to be a HUGE MT fan, both for individual and corporate blogging. No more.
Six Apart managed to completely destroy Livejournal as a community, I expect they’ll move on to destroying MoveableType and VOX as products next. Good on them.
Clearly Anil’s getting a little desperate.
You are right in thanking Six Apart. They were pioneers in the blogging business and they had to look for a business model. I also thought that their license change in 2003 (?) was wrong but they had no proven model to imitate. WordPress entered a much more mature (and growing) market and had no doubts in deciding the business model.
I’m sure both pieces of software are great.
Although I love Perl 🙂
“Could you build Typepad or Vox with Movable Type? Probably not, especially since people with more than a few blogs or posts say it grinds to a halt”
Could you build wordpress.com with WordPress? Probably not, especially since people with more than one blog must use another product, WordPress MU.
Asking if you could build TypePad or Vox with Movable Type is like asking if you could build a Lamborghini or a Jaguar with a Porsche, there’ just no point. 😀
I totally understand your point, I am pro-wordpress as I used to be a MT beta tester in the past and MT developers launched a new version without even notifying the testers, etc. But nowadays I think the best thing to do is to forget everything, love your enemy and such. Wait, what I’m talking about? Kill Mena! I want a naked pic of Matt on my desktop!
JY, yep that’s what I meant, I talked about being able to built WP.com and edublogs.org after the WordPress MU line. My point was you can, and people have, take Free software and create WP.com. In fact last year Le Monde switched thousands of blogs from Typepad to WPMU, I don’t think they could have done the same to Movable Type.
WP maybe open source, but it’s very much controlled by Matt Mullenweg not the developer community.
Michele, WordPress’ success so far is the result of the structure it still has today — there are 4 core committers, dozens of developers who regularly contribute code, and if there’s an unresolved argument or design decision I step in as BDFL to keep things moving, similar to how things work in Python with Guido or Ubuntu with Shuttleworth. This allows us to have the best of community-led development (like the taxonomy system) without getting bogged down in bikeshed discussions.
Matt, Duncan Riley of TechCrunch is again referring Akismet a service that “benefits from the the failure of WordPress to combat comment spam natively.”
I think you need to write a post telling the world why Akismet (or another service like that) is necessary to fight spam. And why “every spam fight rule” cant be added into wordpress core.
Self Exile, that guy is back again? I’m surprised he’s still writing for them. I see Toni already responded in the comments, I think we can leave it at that.
In the past months I’ve been busy running a server hosting several MT (4.1) blogs, and I can say without any doubt Movable Type IS a performance nightmare and doesn’t scale well, at least in an environment, like the one I’m managing, where you have a lot of comments (like a post receiving 400-500 comments in 6 hours).
I’ve always used wordpress before, and i was horrified by how ugly and bad performing MT is.
Even when you enable stuff like memcached, the delayed permanent queue process to rebuild pages, and any improvement, it still requires at least 4 times the processing power wordpress requires with a comparable activity.
I know this because I run several dedicated servers.
I can’t understand how people would build something good out of that software. Maybe they buy some custom improvement, maybe they refer just to publishing and never have taken into account comment spikes, or their software is different from mine (which is not the open source version anyway).
I pity the people who are still resorting for that platform for NEW projects, this server of mine run Movable Time just because those Blogs are born back in 2002, but we’re definitely planning a move to wordpress (perhaps MU) since a long time.
You can run 20 busy WordPress blogs where you run 4/5 movable type ones, ceteribus paribus. That’s my experience.
Your mileage may of course vary, but I sincerely don’t understand that MT people attitude, and from what I read my opinion about them has only worsened.
They’d better improve their software in my humble opinion, that is.
One more thing, MT release a new version on date was promised, not like WP 😀
Matt,
I have to admire you for keeping quiet up till now as respects to MT. And as far as Duncan Riley is concerned, “Bonche”s come in all types. Best when ignored. 😉
IMHO, the biggest mistake anyone could make now is attempting to stuff too much into one release and in my personal “bleeding edge” testing of 2.5, that really doesn’t seem to be happening. Keep on keepin’ on sir. That seems to be what you’re best at.
Yeap. On date, but with millions of bugs ^_^
I’m a huge WP fan have never used MT…. I think Anil’s post was TAME…. let’s not let random noise like his post take one second of mindshare away from the real tasks at hand… WP doesn’t have to justify anything to anybody and the last thing I want is the head of any successful organization responding to comments on Valleywag. I mean, valleywag? Are we that sensitive? Come on Matt, you let’s get thicker skin here, I mean I don’t think for a second that there is any confusion of WP’s licensing, seriously.
I’m not familiar with how the routine goes when a release doesn’t occur on time as 2.5 is the first release I have closely followed, but an update the actual work at hand would have been a more informative and informational post in my opinion. My two cents, worth what you paid for it.
This discussion and banter is serving the exact purpose that I assume SA intended with the post in question, to get SA and MT back into people’s thoughts and dialogues with the least cost and the most splash. I respect and admire Anil and with that in mind, I do wish the post were worded differently and was less crafty and confrontational than it is. Time and energy are being wasted on public sparring that is serving little purpose of WordPress. However I believe a response was in order and Matt does a great job with the post above and in the comments.
As for the TC post by Duncan, his bias against Matt is no secret and I am not surprised that he jumped on the bandwagon to try and disparage WordPress and Automattic. As Toni points out in the comments on the TC post, an Open Source Akismet (algorithm/service) would be counter productive to the effectiveness of the service and the closed nature of the Akismet algorithm is in no way related to the licensing of WordPress.
Anil Dash writes about WP & MT: the crowd in comments goes “Hail WP”.
Matt writes about WP & MT: the crowd in comments goes “Hail WP” once again.
So, where are the MT fanboys, seriously? It really seems to me that this software has *no* community.
I can’t believe there are people so stupid that only speaks to speak because they don’t have anything else to do in his life
I’ve used both, and can say WordPress is a lot easier to deal with. To be fair, this was back in the older days of MT, but I think with all of this going on, I may just try to install it again and compare it to the installation of WP I have running.
@Oscar:
Would you rather have a buggy release rushed out the door, or a release which has had a bit of extra time devoted to it? I know which I’d rather have.
Apparently big time financial blogger Bill Cara can’t stand typepad.
“ADDENDUM (since I still cannot add to the Discourse of my own blog because of a piece of garbage software known as Typekey):”
http://www.billcara.com/archives/2008/03/caras_commentary_community_cha_152.html#more
Talk about desperate and dirty?
gather ye toys and get your move on, spoilt little kid. At the slightest hint of competition,if you have a mental breakdown, that shows your faith in the product(or lack thereof) and confidence in your own leadership(or lack thereof)
Anil’s post was cheeky at best – not dirty, not desperate.
You on the other hand, just pressed the sel-destruct button.
Don’t take your space for granted – ahead today, gone tomorrow.
@Gianluca, what version of MT are you speaking of? I’m always sad to hear when clearly technically savvy people have trouble scaling Movable Type. Setting up MT in a large environment definitely requires some adjustments since the requirements are so different from the smaller environments of most users but it absolutely can be done. I wouldn’t be in business if it could not.
The interesting part of this, to me, is the comparison you’re making between the two pieces of software. Since the default installations of WordPress and Movable Type take diametrically opposed views on publishing (dynamic vs static publishing) and are optimized for different things it’s not fully clear what you mean in saying one scales better than the other. Did you mean that WordPress scales better than Movable Type when the latter is also using dynamic publishing?
Since you mentioned republishing, I would assume that that’s not the case. Under static publishing, the number one most important setting to enable under static publishing is the Publishing Queue (nee RebuildQueue) feature. With this, rebuilds are done asynchronously which gives you the scalability of static pages in high-traffic environments but the immediacy of control in the UI of dynamic publishing. With regards to the high comment rate that you mention, this is doubly important because it eliminates the tethered rebuild operations that occur by default allowing Movable Type to accept comments as quickly as the database will write them while the software republishes the in a sane way on the schedule that you define.
Anyway, if you’re still hosting MT blogs, feel free to drop me a line. I’d be happy to work with you on making them hum.
Like Don West said, any publicity is good publicity. But I do think laying out all that is GPL here was a good idea. If not on your own site, at least on the wp.org site. Perhaps it should be included on the about page, right next to the link to MT? 🙂
Matt, you have “mail”, check your box.
I want to add this: regardless of this product or that product, huge amounts of web applications are just horrible, ugly beasts under the skin, programmed by people (including me) who only have a subset of the true skills to use the tools at hand wisely. From poorly structured programming to huge security holes to insanely bad database practices, it’s all out there. Many of the current CMS out there are just horrible patches on kludges on bandaid covered rotting code, and the people programming them don’t have the time or desire to go back and fix them. instead, they apply patches, fixes, and work around that don’t address the core issues. Most CMS don’t scale very well at all.
If the very basic code is creaky and slow, all the features in the world are for not; and it doesn’t matter if it is pay for use or GPL, the results are the same.
I’m a big fan of WP, having converted from MT like so many others.
I didn’t see anything wrong with Anil’s post, and actually found it rather amusing, esp the title. I think he made a compelling case to look at MT again, and I really fail to see what was so bad about it.
I think that Matt’s responses, both here and elsewhere (esp Twitter), are far worse than anything else. Seems like it was taken too personally.
If WP users are happy, why would they look elsewhere? This argument all seems rather childish and serves to accomplish nothing.
But, hey, what do I know? 🙂
Brilliant response to unreasonable folks. Keep up the good work. Cheers.
A couple of comments based on this entire stream. I’ve never used MT, but have used both WordPress and WordPress MU. It seems a lot of people are hung up on scalability issues. I have no idea how they compare, although I would hope both camps would address scalability in the core (i.e. caching etc) going forward. I think it’s great that you can add caching in WP by using SuperCache, Wp-Cache, etc as plugins, but my opinion is it should be added to the core in some capacity (at the bare minimum it will lay that issue to rest and allow people to focus on other areas). Done right, it results in peppier websites, the ability to handle larger loads, reduced demands on hosting etc. Based on some forum posts, I think this is a direction that at least WP is considering moving in.
Second, to the commenter who suggested it’s advantageous to release software on time instead of slipping on a deadline. I’ve developed software for ten years, and I have yet to meet a corporate person who didn’t understand the need to release solid software as opposed to buggy software on what is usually an arbitrary date. In software, and I’d argue more so with open source, you generally only have one chance to make a first impression. Having a version of your software that is inherently buggy will have the unfortunate result of driving some people somewhere else, even if your solution is the best fit for their needs. Far better to push a date and release something solid that everyone can be proud of.
Ozh: So, where are the MT fanboys, seriously? It really seems to me that this software has *no* community.
Honestly? A good portion of the developer community refuses to engage in these discussion at all, and those of us who do you will note largely restrict ourself to correction of factual errors.
Speaking for myself, there is absolutely no reason for anyone to respond to a WP-related post with “Hail Movable Type.” You may see that as apathy; we see it as not wasting time. I couldn’t possibly care less what application you’re using as long as the choice was informed by fact. Use whatever makes you happy. I found WordPress absolutely infuriating for the one project I’ve built with it, but it clearly works for other people. I had an extended discussion with someone at SXSW this year who thinks they’ve both absolute crap. Isn’t it nice we all have options? We’d never do anything otherwise.
Jay, Matt, that’s a good assessment. D’you know what we use at Shell? Community Server! (and 100s of blogs; makes me cringe.) Why? Possibly for these:
[1] Auto user authentication—like for comments!
[2] Support.
I’m sure the no.2 is available for most, but as far as I know there’s none to beat IE+autologin. The firt hurdle when we face even to recommend a better blog engine is [1]. Solve that and we solve not only getting WP or MT over, but also slip the IE stranglehold on intranet.
Matt, is that something you’re proud of? As a user, it only makes me wary. I think you guys should slow down, let stuff mature, give time for everyone to plug and play well; do one only big feature-release a year, and the rest security fixes.
Chetan, many colleges and such use WP with internal authentication, the auth system is completely pluggable so you can replace any part of it.
As for 3 feature releases a year, yes I am proud of it and I hope we achieve it again this year. It allows us to put improvements in the hands of users more frequently, and helps us not try to cram everything into one release. Our growth has also gone way up since we started more regular releases.
“…and you still can’t do basic things like click ‘next posts’ at the bottom of home page.”
Just thought I’d point out that this is patently nonsense. A couple of MT’s strengths are the rich templating language and static publishing. I’m guessing that the reason WP needed a ‘next posts’ link is because the default is 10 posts a page. With the server overhead of rendering a page, it’s understandable that it’s limited so. With MT’s static publishing, you’re not limited in that respect so you can put more posts on a page with minimal influence on the page load time — it’s just a more efficient process. So there’s not really a need in MT for ‘next posts’ — although if you wanted to, it’s very easy to implement. You can check out my site for an example.
Keep up the good work. I’m currently using WordPress, Akismet, and WordPress mu, and I’m loving them all. Long live open source!
It’s a bit sad, like the losing team begging for a “do over” after time expires. WordPress has already won this game.
Okay, so WP is open source. I think one reason for the confusion is how automattic seems to benefit from wp so greatly. For example, all the free links in the admin and upon installation. I don’t necessarily have a problem with it, it’s just something I don’t understand albeit I’ve been using and recommending wp for many years.
Okay, so WP is open source. I think one reason for the confusion is how automattic seems to benefit from wp so greatly. For example, all the free links in the admin and upon installation. I don’t necessarily have a problem with it, it’s just something I don’t understand albeit I’ve been using and recommending wp for many years.
For developer; if you love PHP then you should hold yourself on WordPress yet if you’re a perl programmer, MT is need your help (they’ve just started anyway).
Thanks for WP Matt 🙂
Bob, starting from version 2.3 links in WordPress no longer point to developers’ blogs – they point to support forums, documentation, and other related websites. Quite reasonable, if you will ask me!
I’ve tried MT twice and both times I found it to be lacking. For one, there is almost no community for creating themes. I lack in the visual creativity department, and I can’t simply “whip up” a good looking theme. There is also a lack of community support for MT. The situation is similar to Opera and Firefox. While Opera is a wonderful piece of software, it is hard to mold and it has a restricted community. Firefox, on the other hand, gives you the opportunity to create a custom masterpiece with the support of many peers and experts. Sure, you can and do often screw up, but it’s all a great learning experience. MT is a great overall piece of software out of the box. It simply doesn’t give me the freedom to use it in the way I want to. I know that I can modify it myself, but I’m simply not this type of guy in the software ecosphere.
Daniel Stout, you are talking nonsense – in WordPress there is no significant difference between showing 10 posts on a page and 100. The link in question is a convenient Google-like way of browsing archives, and it is a shame that there is no such thing in MT.
Dear Matt,
I have always been a fan of your work and you became a GPL poster child. You can hopefully look closer at the GPLv3 pretty soon and make many people proud.
I love and use WP, I’ve used MT before (until 2006 and a server was killed by 2000 spam comments a day). When I switched, WP 2.0x had a better UI than MT 3.3, but if there’s one thing that could make me leave WP again, for all its benefits, it’s the UI (and yes, that includes 2.5 beta 1). I have yet to understand why there’s no drop down menu in the core (2.5 beta 1). 2.5 is a huge improvement over what was there previously, of course. But just taking the design, I’m sorry, MT4’s admin UI beats even the WP 2.5 UI when it comes to looks in my opinion, and looks are important for people looking at that page day in day out – authors (well me, that is). I recently read a discussion about the redesign on one of the shuttle project members blogs and they weren’t overly exited either. I respect the need not to get bogged down in bikeshed discussions and the benefits of a BDFL 😉 for such a community, but I’m rather unhappy about the secrecy with which I think the whole happy cog makeover was handled. I’m not an expert on cooperative software development, but I’ve tried to find some information about the proposals and all I found was a slideshow from last summer, which I thought was rather disappointing – from an *open* development point of view. I understand it’s a tricky balance to keep for a BDFL, but as this thread is so concerned with OPENness, I thought I’d mention my disappointment in this matter,
Matt, that’s really good news! May be it is worthwhile to lay my perception to rest in a post on how enterprise customers can plug WordPress into their intranets—married with Windows auto user authentication. Examples and available list of plugins would be helpful at the least.
I don’t know of any Windows auto authentication plugins, most folks I’ve seen thus far use LDAP or HTTP auth as the glue:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search.php?q=ldap
What Chetan call “auto user authentication”, referring to IE, isn’t more than a Microsoft proprietary authentication mechanism, built in on the browser itself (Integrated Windows Authentication). Nothing to do with WP.
As far as the three releases a year… don’t we update/upgrade our Linux boxes (with a major release) at least once a year? Linux is mature…
Plain and f’ing simple, when the idiots at SA decide to open a FREE blogging service. I’ll use it. Otherwise, they suck I’m so damn used to WordPress now, learning something new, would be a PITA.
Yeah, I do have a Blog on Blogger. Why? Because I can advertise there. I can’t on WordPress.com. and you know what? I’m cool with it, because it’s the rules. Don’t like the rules? Go elsewhere.
Anyhow, Matt Keep up the good work kid, and tell these mooks to go suck a lemon.
I gotcha back boy…
-Chuck
Resident WordPress.com tough guy, eh?
Oh and by the way, to read that up there and have it make sense, think of a mafia, New York, Slightly Italian Accent.
;-P
In my experience, MT has been difficult to use, buggy, cumbersome, non-compliant and generally more hassle than it’s worth. Most of the arguments in Six Apart’s post are nothing short of unfounded FUD, and ignore the fact that WordPress’s design philosophy is different to MT’s.
They also ignore the fact that while WordPress is currently excellent, WP 2.5 is better by an order of magnitude. It includes a nicer WYSIWYG editor compatible with Safari, a customisable dashboard and numerous other improvements. Avatars, OpenID etc can all be achieved by plugins. And they also seem to have conveniently omitted any mention of WordPress MU.
In short, neither post from Six Apart is to be trusted, as it is purely designed to cause unrest amongst WP users and developers. In short, it’s nothing more than a steaming pile of MS-style FUD. And it’s similar to that, in that (IMO) the attacking party’s product sucks.
Here’s a post from someone trying to use MTCS for a client:
http://breakingwindows.com/2008/03/movable_type_community_solutio.php
And thanks for coming out so strongly in support of open source methodology at the Northern Voice conference, not just in how technology projects can be improved but also about their application in wider society.
Thanks
Simon
Trying? I am doing, and doing so very well. I have made an amazing amount of progress in the week I have had to use it, and their Professional Support have been wonderful.
There are a few differences from using MTCS and MT 4.1 (other than the upgrades in UI) such as the way template modules are used, so you can have more control template wise globally. That is one place where MTCS shines is in its Global Templates.
Chuck, just so you know, at Six Apart, we do run Vox, which is a free blogging service that compares very favorable to the other services you’ve mentioned.
Matt, I am a commercial web designer, and for 5 or 6 years I have used about every CMS out there. When I finally discovered WordPress, I stopped looking. Do you know why? Because WordPress just plain works. When I update something, click on something, bold something, or add an image in the WP admin interface–or more importantly, when my clients do this–it just does what I asked it to.
I have recently done a lot of work in the newspaper industry, and everyone seems to love Drupal for everything media . . . but I say they’re wrong. WordPress is hands-down the most powerful CMS ever created, ever–in fact, I have yet to use it as a true web log, but I still love it to death.
Anyway, I’ve always kept up with your blog and have always admired your work and insight. In this post today you seemed a little frustrated, and I just wanted to let you know that you’ll always have at least one die-hard fan in York, Nebraska.
Somewhere in the comments, someone said that a response to the snarky, to use Mr. Dash’s own description, post was needed. I’m sad to say that it probably was. I think this was a no-win situation. If you’d not replied, which I actually would have preferred, people would say that you were too scared, or some other derogatory thing, to respond. But, instead, people will attack this response.
Next time, may I suggest a different strategy? Tell people that the software is free, so just try it and make up their own mind. I think they will. And, as long as your product stays better, they’ll keep choosing WordPress.
My view: Movable Type is a nightmare compared to WordPress.
MT or WP, much of the results are the same: Any software that re-creates entire pages for each visiting user by default is a resource pig that won’t scale. PHP is a very nice language, but most people add but one post per day to their blogs (if even), and if you have 1000 visitors in a day, the system has to re-create that same page 1000 times from scratch, with 1000 sets of DB accesses and such.
Yes, you can add wp-cache or similar, but in reality this should be a core ability that isn’t fully expressed in either product.
There isn’t a single blog style product I have seen yet that scales properly.
(oh and Matt, you still have mail and I do look forward to your comments)
Alex sez: “Daniel Stout, you are talking nonsense – in WordPress there is no significant difference between showing 10 posts on a page and 100.”
Hey, Alex, I took a look at your blog, and you’ve only got six posts, so you might not have experienced the kind of lag time you can get with publishing “100” posts on a single PHP/MySQL-driven page. That’s *a lot* of calls to the database. I’ve used a lot of blogging software since Feb 2000 when I started blogging, but I’ve been very happy with Movable Type. Anil is right about not needing a lot of plugins. There’s lots of functionality available to plug-in, but there’s so much built-in with Movable Type that you don’t end up with a Frankenstein mess of plugins that break every time you upgrade.
Alex, WordPress has a built-in object cache that can reduce most pages to 0 queries, you just have to enable it in your config file. That said, the DB is rarely the bottleneck in most situations I’ve seen.
Daniel Stout, actually in WordPress whether you show 10 post or 100 it’s the same number of queries, it’s just more data. Some non-scientific tests I did on this blog, which has zero caching, showed that the queries were typically less than 10% of the total page generation time.
As for plugin compatibility, of the thousands of plugins available only a few require serious updates, and since it’s easy to follow our development plugin authors tend to have be ready by the time a release comes out.
In 2.3 we included a plugin update notification, so you get a friendly message when there’s a new version of any plugin you use, and in 2.5 we have a one-click upgrade available, like how Firefox finds and installs updates for extensions.
As for the guy you linked to, I generally don’t advocate people use a VPS unless they’re comfortable with configuring server software and tweaking it — 99% of the problems I’ve seen are badly considered web servers, where they load all of PHP (20mb-ish) for every CSS or image hit. However it’s impossible to be sure without looking at his specific setup. A good shared host or something like Media Temple’s Grid Server is a way better choice for most folks. 256mb is actually a ton of memory and more than enough to run a regular blog.
The future of the web is dynamic. I think the dynamic approach of WordPress is right for 99% of sites, and something like Super Cache which writes out static files that work even when the DB is down is right for the other 0.9%. For the top 0.1% of sites in the world, WordPress easily scales across any number of web servers (it’s stateless) and DB servers (with HyperDB). Barry did a presentation on it last year at WordCamp:
http://www.slideshare.net/bazza/high-performance-wordpress
Facebook, WordPress.com, Digg, Wikipedia, Flickr — all dynamic PHP + MySQL.
Matt — Yes, it’s a single SELECT, but you’ll still have to iterate through and pop each record off the queue and process it. I use MT, WP, and Blogger either personally or in my work, and while my preference is MT, it’s always interesting to see what’s out there.
Of my friends who use WordPress, they seem to be always trading notes on plug-ins and adding increasing numbers of them to their installs. Plugins are great to a point, but I prefer having a lot of that functionality baked in. With MT, the plugins enhance the experience, but judging from how I see WordPress used, it appears to be lacking a fair amount of basic functionality that pretty much requires the use of plugins.
I also hear about the great WP community a lot, but when I’ve posted queries on the WordPress.org forums, they haven’t garnered replies. Perhaps they were overlooked, but when I’ve looked it’s been easy to find other people’s dead posts without replies. Just an observation.
At any rate, thanks for the reply, Matt.
I don’t think there’s anythong wrong with people using a ton of plugins, it allows everyone to handcraft their perfect blogging tool a la carte without the bloat of stuff they don’t want.
We do incorporate plugin functionality into core occasionally, but only when it’s something that we think will delight the majority of WordPress users.
I don’t know what you think of this site, but it only uses two plugins – Akismet and WordPress.com Stats.
Matt,
I have never used MT, and I have no reason to ever try it. What I like best about WordPress is that I can make it be a simple blog about my childern (www.mythreedaisies.com) or a tricked out portfolio that bends and obeys my every command (www.tammyhartdesigns.com).
I know nothing about developing php, but I know this: you want it, WordPress can do it.
I am excited about one of my latest projects, because it’s going to use WordPress so well and so intricately. When I’m done, my clients will be able to command their content on their own, without having to be web geniuses. The complex map of pages and templates will work together so perfectly, their rapid addition of posts in their respective areas of the site will keep a great dynamic feel to the site, keeping their readers interested and coming back for more.
If it weren’t for WordPress, and it’s many talented plug-in friends, the web as we know it would still be a tabled, static mess.
I’m Support for the wordpress
Good Job
I am so glad you got your voice up on this one 🙂
WordPress and WordPress MU would be history for ever – as the tools that evolutionized (wrong sp) the Internet.
Regarding bbPress, it still haven’t reached the edge, as it is the case with vBulletin – which recieved much more acceptance.
I Love WordPress -)
“Facebook, WordPress.com, Digg, Wikipedia, Flickr — all dynamic PHP + MySQL.”
Matt : you can add skyrock.com to that list. We switched from static rendering to fully dynamic early last year, more than a 1 billion page views a month, so far so good. 😉
Matt, which “cache” are you taking about? The only cache option I can easily find in WP is WP-cache, which is a little too “all or nothing” for me.
I have plenty more opinion, but this isn’t the time or the place. Safe to say that slavishly making things dynamic just to say they are dynamic is pointless, the true skill is in determining what doesn’t need to be regenerated over and over again, and only regenerating what is truly dynamic in nature. A blog with a single new post a day and a handful of comments isn’t something that needs to be regenerated over and over again for each new visitor, as they experience will be the same as others.
Social networking sites (facebook and skyrock, examples) have a different dynamic, where thousands of new pieces of information are being tossed around and shared and such. These are sites that have a dynamic nature and need a more dynamic build process. But they don’t compare to a blog, now do they?
I remain stunned by the amount of energy people with very similar overall goals spend in-fighting with those most like them.
Is WordPress/Movable Type bashing back & forth really the best use of either community’s time? Really? That’s best for your goals?
Every time this crap flares up again, raw egos at the ready to be bruised, it puts me off both communities (and yes, users of a vended product are a community; you don’t have to code to participate).
Take this damn complaining energy and go do something productive with it! Help people and organizations who aren’t online telling their stories get online. Improve documentation so beginners have a better chance of participating. Fix bugs.
Create something ELSE in the world for people to associate with your product than “oh those guys that spend all their time fighting with those other guys?”
Gah.
The bottom line is the trend of this graph:
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/nin.com?site0=wordpress.com&site1=typepad.com&y=r&z=3&h=300&w=610&range=3y&size=Medium
I was a frustrated TypePad customer and finally moved to self-hosted WordPress on one of my other blogs; hope to get my main blog moved soon.
I couldn’t be happier.
Nearly every time OS projects attack each other, they lose traction in the mainstream. This is part of the reason why neither Gnome nor KDE have emerged as a leader, and part of the reason why Ubuntu and OpenOffice have taken over their OS markets.
WP has done a decent job staying out of this kind of mess, but Anil baited you right into it.
Stop blogging about this sort of claptrap from 6A, and stop adding your own to it, please. I don’t care if it’s only 5 minutes out of your day to fire a volley at MT. Use it elsewhere, anywhere else.
We don’t care, MT’s users don’t care, and 6A just gets publicity. You’ve got better things to do; Anil apparently doesn’t.
Alexa is cool but in many ways flawed. (BTW, Nine Inch Nails? :)) A more direct comparison would be Quantcast, since both WordPress.com and Typepad use their tracking pixel on all the sites:
http://www.quantcast.com/wordpress.com/traffic
http://www.quantcast.com/typepad.com/traffic
My guess is that Livejournal was the vast majority of their users and pageviews, which is why they don’t talk about either number anymore now that they’ve dumped it. Vox has a tracking pixel too, if you’re curious:
http://www.quantcast.com/vox.com
What’s interesting to note there is the WordPress.com numbers above DO NOT include blogs with their own domains, to see the real totals you have to go here:
http://www.quantcast.com/p-18-mFEk4J448M
If you use WordPress, the terrists win!
Oh wait, will you look at that. Anil posted to a Movable Type blog and it’s spurring all kinds of community interaction from WordPress users. And Matt posted here on his WordPress blog with all sorts of Movable Type users coming out of the woodwork to comment.
People using competing products to argue their points; I love the irony.
Leaving aside the licensing questions, the latest version of MT Open Source (4.01) has memory leaks. Yes, you read that right. MEMORY LEAKS. Install that baby and prepare to be blacklisted by your hosting provider!
David, there are obviously always going to be performance and memory enhancements to be made for any application written in a scripting language. If you’d like to visit our community at movabletype.org, you can join the dozens of other people who’ve helped make significant improvements in MT4.1, the current release, along with an extraordinary number of additional fixes to both performance and memory usage going into the next release of MT. There’s no reason to resort to spreading FUD when the facts are readily available.
Whoops, omitted the link I meant to post: http://www.movabletype.org/2008/02/making_your_site_bullet_proof.html
NIN.com is the default domain that shows up in the Alexa homepage for some reason – never was a Trent Reznor fan. 😉 My point in showing that graph, is that WP is moving up and MT/TP is moving down.
IMO, WordPress has the double whammy thing going with both .com blogs skyrocketing, and .org blogs – a lot of people who’ve had static websites built in html now requesting custom WP themes. Oh, and if you want to dip back into the 90’s, even the band Queensryche is hoping to bust out a brand new site design using one of my WP themes!
Thanks for the clarification Matt, WordPress has been my Open Source development platform of choice for the past couple of years primarily because of the openness that you’ve always shown.
Filed under: rant hahaha
Anil Dash wrote:
“Chuck, just so you know, at Six Apart, we do run Vox, which is a free blogging service that compares very favorable to the other services you’ve mentioned.”
Favourably? Try posting a comment to a Vox blog and you’ll get this message:
“You will be asked to join Vox to post this comment.”
I’m sorry, but any service that requires sign-up and registration just to leave a comment breaks all the rules of open blogging.
Personally I’m with Matt. If Anil wants to sell MT, then he shouldn’t do so by saying bad things about a competing product. To me Anil/MT sounded desperate over WP’s share of the blogging world. WP is 100% opensource as Matt said. You can’t get any better than that. And I understand Matt’s reaction to it too. WP is his baby. You don’t just stand there while somebody throws stones at your kid.
I don’t think you should get angry so easily, MT is not your competitor. WP is worldwide, MT isn’t; it’s that simple.
Well, i use WP for years now. Even i encourage friends to migrate into WP from EE and MT. All they said : WP is easy!
MT? Confusing. EE? The free one (EE Core) just to many limitation. They said. Not Me.
Matt,
Talking about scalability and open source, I was very surprised when I learned that WordPress.com uses the closed source (and very expensive) Litespeed webserver.
*Wordpress needs to support a high-performance, open source alternative to Apache*, because the performance of something like NGINX is simply incredible. Supporting a high performance webserver will give WordPress a tremendous scalability boost without having to comb through code to find smaller performance bottlenecks.
So please consider abandoning the use of Litespeed proprietary webserver in WordPress.com, and pick a high performance alternative to Apache, I’m sure whichever it is would flourish after receiving the blessing from WordPress.
That’s a project we’re actively working on.
I don’t know where to start with my comment.
Uhmm.. I’ve read the post on moveable type, regarding the WordPress Upgrade Guide. It’s a lame desperate post, really. And also very miss leading.
Matt, you’ve said everything very well, and I (from my personal point of view) see no match of MT against automattic. They are really really very desperate on hunting you, but nothing can take me away from WordPress!
PS: My friends and I are really looking forward to buddypress 🙂
Great works for everyone. Keep up the good work. Cheers.
Good point Jay, I don’t think very many people, particularly corporations, are making a decision about MT vs WP based on price.
Jealousy is a nasty emotion…..VIVA LA WORDPRESS!!!!!!
After working with both plattforms for various clients, I can only say that I’ve been favoring and endorsing WordPress for quite some time…
Also, most clients seem to favor the simple backend and for us developers, the spirit of the community is just great.
Matt-
While I do commend MT for moving towards that direction I still will never stray from my loyalty to WordPress and what it has done for designers and developers all over the world.
My flag is firmly planted!