Monkeytreats

Movable Type vs. WordPress vs. Typo, Part 4

After all that banging around on three separate platforms, I’m finally up and running, and it’s great. I can quit focusing on making nasty code work, and can put effort into refining the design, refining the setup, and actually writing. And what do you know, it actually seems quite fast (due to fragment caching), and it can use WordPress’ Akismet spam plugin. I honestly can’t see a downside to it…although I still think Typo’s UI is a little weird and could stand a usability overhaul.

All this is not to say that Movable Type and WordPress are bad pieces of software, because they aren’t. Plenty of people run sites quite happily on them. It’s also not to say there’s anything wrong with Perl or PHP, because obviously there are people doing a lot of great work in both languages.

The most important thing this has taught me, though, is that if you’re a developer, you should pick a piece of blogging software that’s built in a language and an architecture that makes sense to you. Note that I don’t mean “a language that you have experience with”—I have only passing experience with Rails, and built a whole CMS in PHP once upon a day. I mean a language and an architecture that makes sense to you, as in “Oh, THAT’S why they did that.”

Ideally, it should be a system that occasionally makes you say out loud, “That is so Goddamn cool.”