Moveable Type 4 vs. WordPres MU

Since I set up WordPress MU in order to manage a few blogs from one central tool it just so happened that I found out about Moveable Type 4. As I was fine with WordPress I didn’t think much of looking at other blog-applications, so I just didn’t care. Today I stumbled upon MT4. And I thought I’d just give it a try. See what the very superior me knows 10 minutes after getting MT4 up and running.

Basic Differences

First things first: MT isn’t a tool for the casual user. It’s another approach than WordPress. While the latter is an encapsulated PHP-application aimed to be as simple as possible (upload – customize – blog), MT feels much more like a publishing platform. The first difference is the installation. For WordPress (MU is pretty much the same, the differences are minor) that is:

1. Upload to your desired operating and blogging directory.
2. Call the installation script
3. Start Blogging

Whereas the MT installation looks like this:

1. Upload the Application to your maintenance directory
2. Adopt the configuration file
3. Call installation script
4. Login to the Maintenance Part
5. Create blogs wherever on the server you feel like having one
6. Start blogging

The difference might not look that big, however I think it is. It’s another backend approach of publishing content. Let’s have a look at my WordPress MU and my Moveable Type 4 installations to compare.

WordPress MU

• Main Site: http://blogs.kno.at/
• Maintenance: http://blogs.kno.at/wp-admin/
• Automatically sets up a “godfather-blog” at the Main site location
• Various blogs are here: http://blogs.kno.at/blog-name/
• Various blogs administration is there: http://blogs.kno.at/blog-name/wp-admin/

Moveable Type 4

• Main Site: http://kno.at/apps/mt/
• Maintenance: http://kno.at/apps/mt/
• From the beginning, there’s only the basic application
• Various blogs are here: Every blog’s address can freely be assigned
• Various blogs administration is there: http://kno.at/apps/mt/

So what’s that mean?

For WordPress MU, the location where files are stored, the overall handling of what’s being done where and the paths to the blogs are fixed. If I chose to use subdomains for blogs and my domain is example.com, all my blogs will have an url like blogname.example.com. If I chose dubdirectories all my blogs will have an url like example.com/blogname. Eventually uploaded files will be stored in wpmu/wp-content/blogs.dir/. Period.

For Moveable Type things are more flexible here. Let’s pick up that example.com – example (uh, repetition!): My domain is example.com. Now I can set paths and URLs for all Blogs to whatever I feel like. There can be blogs with URLs like blogname1.example.com, example.com/blogname2, example.com/here-be-blogs/blogname3, it just doesn’t matter. Also I can easily have my blogs spread all over the domain URL-wise, but keep all my data organized by pointing the storage paths like so: /home/www-root/blogdata/blogname1, /home/www-root/blogdata/blogname2, /home/www-root/blogdata/blogname3. Note that as far as I found out by now you’ll have to care about URL-rewriting yourself!

More crucial differences

The name Moveable Type isn’t just for fun and cosy Web2.0ish feelingness. Actually it’s what the application does – creating moveable contents. That is because, by default, MT4 creates static files every time something is changed in the specified publishing directory for everything – images, archives, feeds. So if I want to move my blog from one domain to another, all I have to do is to move those files to their new location. Neat!

More about moving

Actually it’s not that easy because MT4 currently builds the files with absolute URLs. I couldn’t find an option to change this to relative and am not absolutely sure why this is, but I guess it’s answered somewhere in their FAQs. However it still doesn’t require any magic to do this, because MT comes packed with two options particularly helpful in this case: Blog Cloning and URL changing. Both do exactly what they are called. You might clone a blog any time, to whatever location you feel like. For that cloned blog you then might change the base URL any time, resulting in a full rebuild with the new absolute URLs. If this new URL is on another server and you plan to keep blogging there you’ll have to migrate the database and the actual Moveable Type application too, by the way. At least as far as I see by now. However the static-file-thing would make it easy to write a small shell-script (or even MT-plugin) to automatically synchronize any blog with any FTP location wherever you feel like having your blog. There are also options to publish your blogs dynamically, however when I tried I got 404s for all files except the directory itself – but this might be because of errors in my custom root-.htaccess configuration (I hope not).

Conclusion

I guess the choice really depends on your needs and likings. If all you want to do is blogging, WordPress MU will do just fine. If you want to implement a content management system you might want to consider Moveable Type, due it seems to be much more flexible and appropriate for those things. My opinion, however, might not be very valuable by now, since I only had a rough glance at Moveable Type and don’t know nothing about how flexible it can be used, extended or modified, whereas I have quite a bit experience on doing those things with WordPress.