Earlier this week Movable Type 4 was released into the public domain by Six Apart. Due to the fact that MT4 is a blogging platform, it has received a lot of coverage in the past few days. I’m an avid Wordpress user but I was aware of MT’s existence before this recent avalanche of hype.
I have never really considered an alternative blogging platform to Wordpress but you can’t help but look at the grass on the other side when so many of the herd are grazing over yonder.
At the beginning of this month, Michele Neylon started up a Movable Type Blog in order to document and promote what he feels is a superior product to that of Automatic’s Wordpress.
Michele listed some of his reasons for switching platform in a recent blog post. He noted performance issues relating to SQL queries, the ability to manage multiple blogs from a single installation and the resulting localised security for patching and updating as the key migration factors which will see many of his Wordpress blogs reborn as Movable Type blogs.
Mashable put both Movable and Worpdress on the perverbiable surgeons table and dissected their key features for his compare and contrast post on why one is better than the other. He favored Worpdress when it came to installation, user administration and accessibility. Both systems couldn’t be separated when it boiled down to stability but MT came out on top when it comes to default features as per an out-of-the-box installation.
Ultimately he found in favor of Wordpress but his inspection didn’t cover any performance or security issues (two of the primary reasons given by Michele for his migration away from Wordpress). To be fair though, the dust is going to have to settle on MT4 before these two factors can become realistic candidates for reasons of change.
Popular bloggers on Wordpress often complain about scaling issues. The WP-Cache extension goes some way to alleviate concerns but we’re going to have to wait until MT4 comes out of infancy before we can inspect MT4 coping with a fuller database. It’s very much still in incubation.
Am I going to migrate? I haven’t installed MT4 or even looked under the bonnet yet. I am curious though. I haven’t had many issues with Wordpress which I couldn’t solve via an extension or from starting a thread on the many Wordpress support forums. As a result I don’t have any cause to seek an alternative blogging platform. I will however, install MT locally and I may consider it for future projects.
The one thing I am interested in is running Wordpress as more of a CMS. If Movable Type can do this better with as few hacks/modifications to the core as possible, then it’s a front runner. But for now I’m content with using Wordpress for blogging.
If you plan on migrating platforms from Wordpress to Movable Type, then you may find Michele’s post on the Migration Process a helpful guide.
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thank you for visiting! Cormac
19 responses so far ↓
1 Robert Synnott
// Aug 18, 2007 at 3:57 pm
Movable Type is actually older than Wordpress, and there are some very big sites which use it. Performance (for the person viewing the blog) tends to be better because Movable Type generates static files for each post and index.
2 Cormac Moylan
// Aug 18, 2007 at 4:02 pm
Hi Rob,
I should have made myself a bit clearer on that. I mean MT4 as opposed to MT in general. I have amended the post.
The static paging system looks like a very attractive feature actually. I presume you can edit each satic page so that they use alternative stylesheets? This would help me greatly in my quest for a suitable CMS.
3 Alex Leonard
// Aug 19, 2007 at 2:10 am
They certainly have generated a lot of extra press with their open-source announcement. I’d imagine that I’ll definitely install it and check it out. I am quite fond of the Word Press forums and plug-in system, and in general I’ve been able to sort out pretty much everything I’ve wanted.
I’ve been using Vox for a while and I definitely like Six Apart’s system. I wonder what Movable Type’s output code is like regarding W3C standards.
4 Michele
// Aug 19, 2007 at 12:12 pm
The static files are really cool. My DB went down the other morning, yet you could still browse any of the MT based blogs without it!
Michele
5 Alex Leonard
// Aug 19, 2007 at 9:07 pm
That’s a nice touch. I wonder if WP-Cache works in the same way.
6 Michele
// Aug 19, 2007 at 9:08 pm
Alex
No - they don’t. No DB server = no WP based site
7 Cormac Moylan
// Aug 19, 2007 at 9:22 pm
But I presume if the user wants to comment on a post then the database will have to up? What happens in this case Michele?
8 George
// Aug 19, 2007 at 9:45 pm
“I haven’t had many issues with Wordpress which I couldn’t solve via an extension or from starting a thread on the many Wordpress support forums. ”
I don’t consider myself to be either a designer or a developer but I’ve been able to sort out most of the minor issues I’ve had with wordpress myself or with alittle help from some friends.
Which is just as well as my first and only post to the WP support forum never received a response. E-mails to WP Staff never got a response either, not even so much as a “PFO and use the support forums” that combined with my ongoing “where’d my sidebar go???” issues have made my mind up for me.
Roll on MT4 open source, all you have to do is respond to my suppport queries and I’ll be happier than I am with WP at the moment
9 Robert Synnott
// Aug 19, 2007 at 11:38 pm
Cormac: If they have a relational database, then yes, no-one can comment or search if it’s not up. If they’re using BDB or similar, however, then the only thing that will stop people commenting is serious database corruption; _highly_ unlikely, and generally associated with dodgy memory.
I myself use a MySQL backend for my MovableType blog; databases, when it comes to it, rarely enough actually die, and there’s nothing running on my server which is likely to overwhelm the database.
10 Michele
// Aug 19, 2007 at 11:41 pm
@George - it’s completely free for personal use at the moment so you don’t need to wait for the open source release.
@Cormac - you’d need the database to post a comment as it’s first stored in the database before being actually published ie. written out
11 Cormac Moylan
// Aug 20, 2007 at 12:00 am
Thanks for clearing that up Robert, Michele.
12 Matt
// Aug 20, 2007 at 12:13 am
13 Michele
// Aug 20, 2007 at 12:29 am
@Matt
I never said anything about on-disk DBs, so please don’t put words in my mouth.
Of course you’re avoiding the key issue - WP does not cache by default, which is where one of the main issues arises.
And since most end users don’t have a clue about what goes on behind the scenes they’re more likely to blame the host rather than the software and any of its dodgy plugins and extensions.
14 Matt
// Aug 20, 2007 at 12:49 am
Sorry, I confused your comment with Robert’s, I meant to direct that sentence at him.
WP doesn’t cache by default because it doesn’t need to, its resource usage is well within range for decent hosts around the world. If it wasn’t, they’d stop offering it as a one-click install which all of the biggest hosts do.
I do agree that people shouldn’t blame their host for problems with bad plugins, which I have seen cause big problems before, but there is nothing in core that should cause undue load issues. Our use of the database is pretty conservative and has been reviewed by performance experts at MySQL, including some of the same folks who work on Wikipedia.
15 Robert Synnott
// Aug 20, 2007 at 6:16 am
Matt: Besides possibly Wikipedia, all of the sites that you mentioned are highly interactive, to the point where on every page view things must change. This is hardly the case for a blog; a busy blog may receive thousands of page views per change. Incidentally, almost all of the sites you have mentioned have had to resort to levels of caching so heavy that they approximate pre-generated sites.
By the way, Blogger uses the same approach as MT for non-Blogger-hosted blogs, and did for Blogger-hosted blogs until quite recently.
Wordpress’s out-of-box performance is… unimpressive. Back when I used it, on a machine which normally has more or less zero load levels and with no superfluous plugins, it caused heavy load and noticeable slow loading of pages on only small traffic spikes. And this was not for a popular blog. Granted, this was version 2.
I wouldn’t call Wordpress’s use of the database conservative by any stretch of the imagination. It has improved since this (http://dammit.lt/2006/03/25/wordpress-sql-query-review/) in that it now mostly allows MySQL caching to operate correctly, for instance, but it has a long way to go. There’s a fair bit of opportunity to reduce query count and some opportunity to speed up individual queries.
While Wordpress clearly can get around most of the DB silliness with appropriate caching, this isn’t something that’s on by default, and in the case of memcached not something that can be done on a shared host.
16 Matt
// Aug 20, 2007 at 6:39 am
Domas, who you linked, was actually one of the people who helped us clean things up after 2.0. The fact of the matter that if you look at the timer kept in $wpdb, and compare the total page generation time, it’s a small fraction. Hosting 1,300,000+ WP blogs I spend a lot of time looking at debug logs and cachegrind dumps, so I’m pretty familiar with this issue.
For example: the home page of photomatt.net does 7 queries, takes 0.169 seconds to generate, but only 0.04 seconds is spent waiting for the DB. For single blogs queries are not the limiting factor in either performance or scalability of WP.
A lot of the sites that switched from MT to WordPress, like About.com and the New York Times, did so because of performance. Counter-intuitive? It’s because they got so many comments, so much spam, and had so many authors that rebuilds were killing them. MT can now background the rebuild process so you’re not sitting there waiting, but that just means your changes take longer to show up on the site. It simply hides the problem.
Memcache is a separate discussion from wp-cache, which requires nothing special on the server level. But WP has a pluggable object cache that out of the box can cache to files with a config file trigger, or with plugins can use APC or Memcached, as we do on WordPress.com.
The future is interactive. That’s why Blogger spent years moving from static files to dynamic like they are now, and Six Apart doesn’t use the Typepad/MT model for their newer a higher-traffic sites, like Livejournal and Vox. It’s also why they added a dynamic publishing feature (using PHP, Smarty, and WP’s database class) to MT over a year ago.
17 Robert Synnott
// Aug 20, 2007 at 7:39 am
“The fact of the matter that if you look at the timer kept in $wpdb, and compare the total page generation time, it’s a small fraction.” - I frequently visit Wordpress blogs which take a number of seconds to load; I sincerely hope that it IS the database taking up most of the time, rather than the page generation…
A default install of Wordpress makes about 30 queries per page. Some of these use fields which seemingly could be profitably indexed, although this situation has improved considerably since 1.5.
Livejournal actually predates Movable Type by about two years. Blogger has done precious little with its dynamic page generation that they weren’t doing before; I suspect it’s simply a model that suits Google better for deployment purposes and I seriously doubt that each page view causes 30 hits to a relational database. When you say “the future is interactive”, what do you mean? A blog’s a blog; it takes posts and allows comments. I don’t see how much more interactive you’d want it to be.
I’m not saying Wordpress doesn’t have its uses. I’ve found Wordpress.com to be generally tolerably fast, and I can see how it could work for the big sites you mention. But I suspect MovableType is a better solution for the average user.
18 Arvind Satyanarayan
// Aug 21, 2007 at 10:09 am
That’s a bit of a misleading comment. Both MT and WP make use of EzSQL. In fact, MT’s implementation of EzSQL is far more complex due to database abstraction. Rarely in MT (or it’s plugins) need you ever execute literal/hardcoded SQL statements.
19 Anil
// Aug 21, 2007 at 10:14 am
Hi Cormac, I work with the MT team and just wanted to drop you a note… I think everybody’s covered all the basic facts here but just wanted to say we’re happy if you’ve already found a tool that meets your needs, and happy if we’ve made one that might be useful for you in the future.
One quick note…. Matt says MT’s dynamic publishing uses WP’s database class, by which I think he means EZSQL? That’s a separate open source project both tools benefit from, but the point is definitely that we can share technologies that help everyone. Similarly, Memcached, which WP.com uses, along with almost all the other sites Matt mentioned above, was created by our LiveJournal team (they’re part of Six Apart, too) and works with MT4 out of the box. Sharing technology is a good thing!
I think most of us who are serious bloggers will probably end up in a more-than-one-tool or “all of the above” scenario, and if that’s the case, glad to see MT might be considered as one of them. It might seem like we’ve gained a bit of momentum from your perspective, but the team’s been working on MT for 6 years, so it feels like you’re thinking about hopping on board a train that’s been rolling for some time, which is great.
More choices and more good tools is good for everybody.
Leave a Comment