And in this corner, as a contender for replacing Movable Type here, is WordPress, probably the most popular blogging platform around. I’m interested in hosting my blog myself, for a variety of paranoid reasons, so any sort of hosted blog service (including WordPress’s own) is out.
So somethings about WordPress.
First, one of the standard criticisms (or advantages, depending on who you talk to) of WP is that it’s all dynamically published — there are no static pages of generated HTML, just pages pulled out of the database on the fly. MT took the other approach, initially. Static pages take longer to save, take up much more disk space, and may require rebuilding if you change elements of the blog, but are fast to load with minimum effort.
Enough folks get by with dynamic pages I’m not too worried.
Another issue with WP is the multi-blog situation. I currently have four pretty active blogs here (including BD’s and WIST), three more with limited activity, and two that are old experiments. So make it seven blogs I want to keep up.
WP appears, out of the box, to support a single blog. The implication is that I’d have to install and support a separate WP installation for each of my blogs.
Now, that’s not necessarily just a bad thing. Yes, it means that any maintenance I have to do has to be done seven times. If there’s a plug-in I want universally, I would have to install it on each blog. And there’s the extra disk space of multiple installations. Etc. Annoying.
On the other hand, it does mean that each blog can be maintained separately, and if I do an upgrade on blog X, or try out a plug-in there, or want a plug-in that’s incompatible with a plug-in I use on blog Y, I can do that. It’s more work, but it’s work that’s more easily done in smaller, more manageable chunks.
It’s not even necessarily a forced case. There’s a couple of ways to handle multi-blog WP I’ve found with just a bit of poking. WordPressMU is designed for just that (though with the idea of hosting multiple people’s blogs rather than multiple blogs for a person). Ryan McDonnell seems to have figured out a way to do it on his own, assuming you have command-line access to your host. There appears to be a fair amount of discussion on the general topic, and in fact the official WP doc that starts off with saying you need a separate install for each blog points to the above and several other fancy ways of handling it.
So, if I decide that single-blog set-up is a non-starter, there are ways to skin that cat. I’m honestly not sure if it’s that big a deal.
- This Smackdown from June of last year compares MT to WP, which is an interesting way of getting a sense of the two of them and what would change for me going from one to the other.
- Someone who changed and some plug-ins they used.
- Another comparison, favoring WP. I’ll confess I’m a bit daunted about shifting from templating info with HTML and specialized MT tags to PHP. I’ve not had any great desire to learn PHP, but it seems I’ll likely end up learning a little of it.
- A good series on one person’s conversion from MT to WP.
- This article compares in favor of MT. Honestly, though, the cool stuff touted for MT out of the box is, in general, mostly stuff I’m not interested in (esp. since I do all of my posting from outside of the actual client, via Linear). The same is true for the infamous “Yeah, upgrade … to MT” post.
Doyce notes that our host offers WP up in a very easy Fantastico package. Which means it’s nearly painless to try it out. Hmmmmm …