October 11, 2007

Why I Don't Use WordPress

Update, May 21, 2008: Since writing this post seven months ago, many of my criticisms against WordPress have since been rectified; for a review of version 2.5, see notes and miscellanea.


If you're a new visitor here or haven't checked out the about page, you may be surprised to hear that this blog does not run on WordPress-- like much of the blogosphere-- but rather, Movable Type 4. I've given WordPress plenty of chances to be my CMS of choice, and I even use it on a regular basis for a side project, but for my own blog, it just doesn't cut it for me.

There are several key reasons I'll cover in a bit; but first, just a little background food for those of you not familiar with why WordPress is so popular. If you already know (or just don't care), just skip down.

That Free Thing

In 2003, two things were very different about Movable Type and WordPress: Movable Type still offered a generous free version, and the latter wasn't explodingly popular yet. That all changed in 2004, when Six Apart released Movable Type 3 and changed the licensing up- namely, limiting personal systems to three blogs and one author. And it certainly wasn't good for that personal userbase, because the ones who didn't want to pay up migrated to WordPress.

So between Six Apart's crippling of their free service and other methods of spreading the word, WordPress began to blossom in popularity. The system was open-source, unlike Movable Type, and had more power than Blogger. Even the WordPress templates, as already mentioned, looked fantastic, trumping both services. Basically, WordPress fought Movable Type and won, fair and square. It wasn't until version 4.0 was released this year that the personal version of Movable Type was finally restored of its unlimited users and weblogs rights.

For The Record: It's Not For The Templates

Back in March, John Gruber of Daring Fireball linked a fantastic post by Joe Trotter on WordPress:

I have a penchant for knowing - just, well, knowing - when a blog or website is powered by Wordpress. You know? Way too many links in the sidebar or header, usually styled the same way? Info all over the place? A candidly modified Kubrick theme? Referring to static pages as, omigod, Pages?

Here's what makes it worse: every single blog I want to be like, Kottke, Daring Fireball, Design Observer, et cetera - they all have these "I'm a blog but have actual class" air to them. And guess what - they're all powered by Movable Type. I've been denying there's a connection. There, quite simply, is. Wordpress has become so widespread, so recommended - it's becoming the new Blogspot. And that - that mutiny of identity - is the path Six Apart has simply, artfully avoided.

Gruber's follow-up goes like so:

This is an interesting observation, but it's a conflation of software and templates. Movable Type sites based on its default templates are just as easy to identify as those based on WordPress's default templates. What makes the sites Trotter mentions notable isn't that they're all using Movable Type, but that they're all based on original designs.

He's right: Movable Type's default templates are just as easy to identify as WordPress's default templates; the difference in my opinion is that Movable Type's are so unglamorous that anyone who has time to pay for a web server and own a web site probably has the skills, money, or friends to make a custom design.

So basically, because WordPress's templates are aesthetically pleasing, they've become overused to the point that you just see default WordPress templates more often than Movable Type ones. I'm not using Movable Type because of it's templates, and could probably bend WordPress's templating system to my will if necessary (more on that later.)

The Part Where I Contribute My Story

Back in July as I began to grow dissatisfied with Blogger, I started searching for alternatives for my impending blog overhaul. I was using WordPress to post on MacThemes and had just finished installing Movable Type for Taco Widgets, which means I was working with three different CMS's to post. Wanting to knock out Blogger for both power and convenience, the two final candidates for my search were WordPress and Movable Type.

And, surprise surprise, Movable Type won. But it wasn't out of spite for WordPress' success or out of sheer desire to see it lose. After some long work running through each one, this is what I decided:

  1. Bending WordPress' templating system is difficult and tedious. I know HTML and CSS and could probably spend a couple of days installing the CMS and plugging in my design, but to be totally honest, I think Movable Type's documentation is just better-written: the setup is crystal-clear, and getting all of the tags plugged into my template only took, accumutatively, about 5 hours to finish and polish the entire enchilada- that is, create and format the front page, permalinks, archives and miscellaneous pages.

  2. Markdown, SmartyPants, and iPhone plugins are all Movable Type-exclusive. I understand WordPress has a huge, 1000+ plugin community, but the 500+ plugin community Movable Type houses is nothing to joke at, especially since the former two plugins became integrated into version 4 and the latter is helping sell the switch away from WordPress now.

  3. Movable Type's editor kicks ass. In Movable Type, you get Body and Extended tabs, six different ways to format your post (HTML, Blogger-esque "Convert Line Breaks", Markdown, Rich Text, or Textile), well-organized publishing options, and live previewing. I write this as WordPress continues to remove my hard code line breaks with any of my Mac browsers (Safari, Camino and Firefox) and restricts me to its no-code or all-code editing formats.

  4. Most importantly, WordPress's interface is not correctly organized. Movable Type's main interface organizes items into four main tabs: Create, Manage, Design, and Preferences, with the menus for actions nested inside these options. When you think about it, those are, essentially, the four core items most bloggers will be doing at any given time: writing their content, managing their content, presenting their content, or affecting how they work with their content. We can deal with the specifics once we make one of those four decisions on what we need to do next.

    But the WordPress interface just doesn't work that way. The admin navigation bar consists of a myriad of various actions, but they're not sorted correctly. Fair enough, Write, Manage, and Options are up there, but what about the other items? For example, I'm not dealing with comments, my blogroll, or my profile at almost any given moment, so why are those high-priority items? Comments and Blogroll should be under the "Manage" tab, and Profile should be under the "Options" tab. Even the Dashboard is essentially an RSS feed for the developer blog, aside from a few textual links whose locations are accessible directly from the tabs.
    Update: Commenting on the Digg submission, Mark Jacquith writes: "We used to have "Comments" under "Manage," but found that we were burying essential (and frequently used) functionality. I've had many WP users tell me that it's much better as a top tier menu item." Fair enough, that makes sense to me.

I should mention that I'm not opposed to switching to WordPress if/when my complaints are fixed; I seek to use the best publishing tool, and if WordPress reaches that level (without too many plugins, of course), I'll jump on the bandwagon. But for now, I'm sticking with Movable Type, and after about 2 months of usage, I think I've made the right choice.

* ...it's also worth noting that Kubrick- WordPress' default template- was still fresh before WordPress hit stardom.