After installing Movable Type for my web design 2 class here at TCNJ, I was a bit surprised at the effort it took to install it. Not hard but certainly took some care and editing of the config file. The documentation was clearly not as clear as it could be and was very long.
We installed it just before the switch over to Moveable Type 3 and the subsequent price change / fall out with MT supporters. Seeing the death of MT on the horizon I also thought I would look for another solution. A quick search for Moveable Type comparison brought up a good number of posts by people also looking to get off of the MT ship. I had hear a lot of good things about the Expression Engine (which I keep typing Emotion Engine like the PS2 chip set) but that also works on a play plan.
It became obvious very quickly that WordPress was the best option. Going in there were two downsides compared to MT. MT makes it easy to set up multiple blogs with one install of MT while WP only allows one blog per install. MT’s template system is also a bit more intuitive. WP uses a lot of php includes and can break all your templates to about 14 different files.
I had no need to create multiple blogs with one install and so that problem evaporated away. The templates remained a downside but I figured it couldn’t be too bad.
The install process compared to MT was amazing. WordPress press only needs 4 lines changed and it is clearly documented what needs to change. After those lines are changed you just upload to the directory you want your blog in and load the setup page. The set up page is two pages. Two pages! At the end of the second page it apologized for not being harder. It was an amazing install.
The templates are kind of a bitch. I didn’t know enough about them to start from scratch but editing 5 or 6 files just to make the main page look like your webpage is very annoying, but it’s obvious that it’s a very powerful system that allows for quick updates in the future.
Over all I’m very happy with how the WordPress experience is going. I definitely will recommend WordPress to Ricardo for the web design 2 class next time.