Back in May 2004 Sixapart announced they were closing up Movable Type with a set of draconian licenses that essentially set out to punish the countless people who contributed to the project.
This move was met with much hatred throughout the blogging world and large amounts of people responded by simply moving on, making WordPress todays leading Open Source blogging platform.
Today it was announced that they are heading back to their roots and giving Open Source another try.
Ever since the changes with our version 3.0 launch three years ago, there have been those who are quick to judge or quick to question whether the intention of openness was ever there. And of course, we’ve since learned a lot about how to communicate better with our community, and how to build a sustainable business that we’re proud of, so that we can ensure even greater investments in Movable Type. We hope that it’s not just the
launch of MTOS that demonstrates our commitment to openness — from our
community feedback process (which has already yielded a completely new MT wiki) to our creation and promotion of open
standards for the web to our genuine interest in dialogue with the
communities we serve, we truly believe Movable Type is the most open
platform around.
I think Movable Type is a great application and I use it for my own blog, I am certainly very glad it is now Open Source and I have no real reason to move off it. But I think the damage the last few years has done to the community is immense.
When I started out with Movable Type and my blog in 2003 there were a ton of MT resources out there, when new versions came out the community literally jumped and ported extensions to it, made new themes and plugins for it and as a whole rallied behind the company. Today the situation is very different, just try and find a single good resource for MT4 themes and skins that support all the various new technologies built into it with widget sets, the new templating system etc, there are a few but nothing as amazing as there used to be. Have a look at the lack of ported plugins etc, the uptake and enthusiasm for the product is gone, WordPress is where its at today.
This could be in part due to the constant breaking of backward compatibility and reworking of template systems, changing APIs and such though I am not convinced. This situation is pretty much par for the course in the Open Source world and anyone willing to commit to contributing does so and are prepared to port at the drop of a hat.
It just isn’t happening with MT, not because Sixapart made it too difficult, not because people aren’t prepared to support a changing product but simply because Sixapart alienated its contributors.
Todays announcement lists a number of cool things the community contributed over time, it was delivered in spin that would make most political parties look like amateurs, fact is the list that they showed as community contributions, not many of those are recent, not many of those are breakthroughs that happened since 2004, why? Because everyone fell out of love with MT.
I think the move is one of desperation, I wish them all the luck in the world as I do not want to move to a new blogging platform so it is in my interest to see this work for a long time, but I am afraid that ship has sailed. I hope I live to eat my words though.
I think the overall technology – namely Perl – just doesn’t belong on the web anymore, this will no doubt be met with a lot of scorn by certain types, but the general idiocy around Perl 6 etc will sink anything that is based on it, WordPress ultimately is in a much better camp being PHP based.
But lets not sling opinion around too much – nevermind that I am still mentally recovering from the displeasure of trying to maintain a MT Enterprise installation on a really big site. To gauge the community involvement is simple, both companies publish a plugin directory on their website.
Movable type: Total Plugins: 578, ones tagged as working with MT4 68
WordPress: Total Plugins: 1277, it is not indicated if these work with some versions of WP and not with others.
So 11% of MT plugins got ported from 3 to 4, some were just not needed because the functionality were added directly to MT4 for sure – like Captcha’s – others, I guess the authors packed up and left to another platform or simply stopped blogging. Either way, it is a pretty sorry state of affairs for MT to be in.
If I had to choose a blogging platform today, and had to weigh up MT against WP, my money would be on WP without needing to spend too much time thinking about it. I recently created a new blog – now defunct – it was based on WP and my next one will also be.
