There was a moment last week when I thought that I could honestly switch to WordPress and have no problem with it, but every time I design with it, I feel like I’m cobbling something together instead of using the defined framework. It’s a little hard to tell, because sometimes you find regular PHP beside template tags. Granted, it works, and that should be all that matters. But I do love that Movable Type defines most of the things you will ever need for your site in advance. It just helps cement my choice of CMS a little more thoroughly.

There are a few things I would change, and a few of these I have definitely brought up before.

1. Features

   This one is a little nitpicky, since I have no complaints about the bulk of Movable Type’s built-in features, but did you know that Movable Type hasn’t had proper article pagination until Version 4.3 (please correct me if I’m wrong)? I’m talking a simple previous/next entries link at the bottom of the page. I racked my brain trying to find a solution to work on my poor little 4.1 installation, but all of my best efforts failed. I tried about four plugins, and none of them managed to do anything either. Which brings me to my next point:

2. Plugins

   I don’t know what happened to the developer community for Movable Type, but there’s not too many of them left. Just for comparison’s sake, WordPress has 7,965 available plugins. Movable Type has a mere 910. I’ll leave the guffawing and math to you guys. In the mean time, I might start writing my own, although this seems like a bad idea all over. Now, quantity usually doesn’t matter, and there are quite a few quality plugins on the community site, but maybe only one working version, or perhaps two, of the same sort of script. What ends up happening is that you don’t have alternatives to turn to if nothing works out. And when you really want help, the place you turn to first is the community forum:

3. Support

   I can rant and rave about this at length. Fewer users means fewer knowledgeable users, which means fewer people who have answers rather than more questions. It really keeps coming down to the size of the community. You can have all the functionality in the world built into your CMS, but if no one’s constantly surging ahead and syncing it with the latest technologies, it won’t matter at all. There’s not a great deal of dignity in being just behind the baseline.

4. External Help

   A lot of the really great sites for Movable Type help that I mentioned in one of my previous posts, like Movable Tweak, Learning Movable Type, and Movalog have either stopped updating or just don’t work. It’s always a good sign if the company that makes the product has the best support site for it, but it’s slightly more tragic when it’s the only one around. I mean, where do you go to when there’s nothing else?

Solutions

I encourage developers, programmers, and curious minds to try sparking some new life into MovableType.org. It’s a wonderful platform, and while most people aren’t comfortable with Perl/CGI — that’s it, isn’t it? PHP is more accessible? — it doesn’t look too bad. Hell, if I say I’m going to try it, it can’t be that bad.

I think a lot of you guys will get the impression that I’m just punishing myself by using MT, by wearing myself out until I just shiver and hallucinate about WordPress all day, but it’s just because I really like this system, and I hate to see it wear away. Six Apart is doing their part by creating a brand new version which, aside from the admin panel woes, and the catering towards a community site rather than a personal blog — hence the word “site” throughout. Now I think it’s my turn to chip in.

Or perhaps, this is as good as it gets.