Like many other bloggers, I switched to WorPress when the Moveable Type license changed. It used to be that you were free to use MT for personal use with no limitations. Then they came out and imposed a restriction where you were only allowed one author per installation for personal use. This was a bad move; one that pushed more people over to start using WordPress, which was still relatively new in 2004. People who had resisted switching due to loyalty and goodwill to Sixapart and MoveableType felt like they had been taken for granted as users and as contributors to the overall success of MT. When important members of the community started dropping out, the writing was on the wall. Several people who had contributed templates, plugins, and support on the MT forums took their skills and influence to other projects. The chief beneficiary being WordPress, which was attractive due to its growing community, active development, and open source license. Simply put, changing the license was a stupid business decision for a few reasons:
- Bad timing. In 2004, WordPress was starting to attract a lot of attention even in an environment where MovableType and SixApart were well-loved and respected.
- It split the community. Many early bloggers started with Blogger and moved to MoveableType. In a real sense, blogging and bloggers grew up with MoveableType. When SixApart changed the license, it was like they were cashing in on this group experiment to the detriment of the people who helped them reach that level of success.
Now, MT is free again for personal use with an unlimited number of authors. We have come full circle, but the environment has changed. WordPress is now more popular than MoveableType and the arena is crowded with competitors. On the low end, many entry-level bloggers are using free services like Blogger, MySpace or Livejournal instead of rolling their own blog using tools like WordPress or MT. On the high end, many enterprise-quality CMS projects like Expression Engine, Joomla and Plone have incorporated blogging or blog-like functionality.
I checked out MT again last week and it’s starting to look dated, although I had forgotten how much easier their templating scheme is compared to WordPress, although WordPress has some advantages due to being more dynamic as it’s structured using PHP. One change they need to make for MT is to reskin the administration panel so that it looks okay at higher resolutions. It was clearly designed for users with low resolution desktops.
I did a Google search using the following terms and their results:
- wordpress (official spelling) – 207,000,000 hits
- word press – 396,000,000 hits
- movable type (official spelling) – 83,900,000 hits
- moveable type – 86,900,000 hits
- movabletype – 17,900,000 hits
- wordpress plugins – 30,900,000
- movable type plugins – 5,900,000
In a strict Movable Type vs. WordPress contest, WordPress seems like the obvious winner based on these results. It will be interesting to see what Sixapart does in the future with their products. Can they keep Movable Type relevant while they pioneer new Livejournal-style sites like Vox?