I’ve been using Movable Type (MT) for a few years now, and I finally gave WordPress a try. There are several things that are similar, but there are some key differentiators that I’d like to point out.

What’s the Same

Here are the similarities between WordPress and Movable Type:

• A nice UI for the admin tool
• Easy to install on a remote server (more on this below)
• Logical template organization with a series of includes for easy maintainability

What’s Better about Movable Type

The Templating Language

While MT’s template syntax does take some getting used to, it’s very intuitive and thorough. Everything you can think of that you’d ever want to do on a blog is available. If you want to list the articles of a specific category, you simple use the category template tag, give it some attributes to customize the output, and it’s available. WordPress, on the other hand, makes you manage PHP loops. You have access to a variety of things, but you’re constrained to the current PHP loop you’re in. So if you want to show the last 10 articles for each category on any given page, you have to establish a new loop that provides access to that kind of data. It’s quite the maze of contexts, PHP functions, and attributes to customize those functions. I find Movable Type’s template tags to be much more intuitive and portable.

Static Publishing

This may not necessarily be a bonus to using Movable Type, but if your site is very popular and you want to run it on cheap, shared hosting, then static publishing is a great way to go. It essentially creates an HTML page for each article once when you publish your site. Thereafter, each time a user accesses an article, it is available without having to look anything up in a database. Unfortunately this feature is also MT’s downfall, which I’ll discuss next.

What’s Better about WordPress

Instantly Available Output

When you’re working on a new blog template (a.k.a. WordPress theme), and you tweak some markup and CSS, you simply have to refresh your browser and WordPress instantly shows the result. When doing the same thing with Movable Type, you have to republish your templates in the admin tool. To navigate to the correct page, click publish, wait, and then refresh your browser is a minimum of 5-6 seconds. Simply refreshing the WordPress page in your browser only takes about a second. Why would such a small amount of time matter? It depends on your development style, but I like to tweak n’ peek. I make a few small changes, then refresh in the browser to see how it looks. I repeat this process hundred, even thousands of times through the course of a template design. That really adds up when it takes 5 seconds longer to do with Movable Type.

Local Installation

You can get Movable Type to install locally on a Mac, but it’s not trivial (this article may help). Getting WordPress to run locally is just as easy as it is on a remote server. I really like being able to fully develop my template/theme locally and then just push it to the server when it’s ready. This saves a lot of time, especially with how much faster your local server is than a remote one.

Automatic Updates

In recent versions of WordPress (2.9+), upgrading to the next version of WordPress is fantastic. It only takes a couple clicks in your admin tool and it’s done. The same goes for plugins. Movable Type has hitherto been a lot more involved, and you have to get your FTP app out and rework things. More recent versions may have changed this, but I’ve been off Movable Type for almost a year now.

The Winner

Overall, I like WordPress better because of it’s faster theme development. When it comes to day-to-day blog use, they’re essentially equal, but when you build custom themes all the time, ease of development is a dispositive factor.