WordPress 2.5 is scheduled for release and the buzz on the web is that the transition is going to be another difficult one. Like the previous upgrade to the 2.3.x, themes will be broken and plug ins will be rendered useless. It’s part of the carnage of progress.
My blog clients don’t have to worry. When WordPress 2.5 is released, I’ll go through these steps, work out the kinks and when I upgrade their blogs to 2.5 the only “surprise” in store for them will be whether their chosen theme makes the transition.
However, Daily Blog tips reports Moveable Type has taken a “swing” at WordPress and tried to spin the negative buzz surrounding the upcoming WordPress upgrade into positive growth for their platform.
The biggest problem I can see in the PR war between the two platforms is that it’s been my experience that Six Apart (Moveable Type/Typepad) customers are much less tech savvy than WordPress users... they don’t understand blogging basics such as trackbacks which is an important part of building a successful blog.
So we have two camps in this war… in one corner we have Moveable Type and Typepad users… who don’t understand why turning on trackbacks for each and every post is important. Their “flagship” blog is sporting an Alexa ranking of 55,035.
In the other corner, we have the tech savvy crowd backing WordPress. Users in this camp include heavy hitters such as Micheal Arrington of Techcrunch (Alexa ranking 926) Darren Rowse of Problogger (Alexa ranking 3,529), Daily Blog Tips (Alexa ranking 14,490) and the Blog Herald (Alexa ranking 33,003)
I know, I know… Alexa is skewed towards the tech savvy user…. which is why it’s a valuable resource in this discussion.
For my non-techy readers… Alexa is a type of traffic spy device provided by Amazon. You install the toolbar and Alexa tracks your web surfing activities and ranks sites in order from 1 to 10,000,000 + and displays this ranking in the toolbar. Alexa detractors point out the “regular people” don’t usually have the tool bar installed so results are skewed and instead of displaying the ranking of a site’s traffic, instead the tool bar displays the ranking of a site’s traffic amongst the most tech savvy of web users.
I’ve already placed my bets on the optimal blogging platform for me and my clients…. because when faced with the choice of a platform backed by the tech savvy and a platform of choice for the “less tech savvy”…. I’m going with the platform with the big guns behind it.
My parents bet on Beta as the format of choice for home video recording more than 25 years ago…. they still have that beta max machine in their basement today. I didn’t want my clients stuck with the “beta” equivalent of blogging platforms. Therefore, my choice was influenced by several factors. First, WordPress has incredible community support. Combine that strong community support with the caliber of bloggers choosing the platform, and WordPress pulled into the lead. However, the final “straw” in making my decision was when Template Monster began offering WordPress Themes. Commercial backing + strong user community = winner in my book.
I know there are other GOOD blogging platforms out there, but rather than be a jack of all trades, master of none… I made what I believed to be the BEST choice for my business. Speaking of which, I don’t see Drupal’s developers taking potshots at WordPress. Instead, they’re heralding the migration of Popular Science Magazine to their platform. Way to go Drupal!
Hi, thanks for the post. I wanted to clear up a few things, since I work with the Movable Type team. First, did you have a chance to take a look at the post that we wrote which started this whole conversation? Our goal was to highlight what our platform does particularly well — we were fair, even-handed, and asked for feedback if there were any factual errors. Unfortunately, the conversation turned into some kind of emotional slugfest, which wasn’t our intent, and which we haven’t gotten involved in. Please — read the post, and see if you think there’s anything “nasty” in it. I’d be surprised if you do, and you should judge for yourself.
Second, saying that MT users don’t know what TrackBack is is ridiculous — Movable Type is the platform that *invented* TrackBack and our company Six Apart first popularized it. If you want to talk about tech-savvy MT users, you can point at BoingBoing or O’Reilly Radar or ReadWriteWeb or any one of dozens of others. That’s not to mention enormous media properties from the Huffington Post to the Washington Post, which all use MT as well.
And finally, when it comes to commercial support, we wrote the book in many ways. MT was one of the earliest platforms to offer professional support, as well as one of the first to offer enterprise-grade backing for business blogs. The whole point in starting this conversation was to educate people about the platform, and I think if you read what we actually wrote, instead of second-hand spin about the post, you’d be pretty impressed. Again, we’re not interested in a petty shoving match in the blogosphere, we’re focused on makng great blogging tools, and our coders are busy adding exclusive features like Action Streams and OAuth and Fire Eagle support and the best OpenID integration in the business. (Oh yeah, and Six Apart is where OpenID was invented, too.) We’ll let developers on other platforms waste their time on bickering, but we will absolutely spend time showing people the work we’re proud of, too.
Anil’s last blog post..About Anil Dash
Hi, thanks for the post. I wanted to clear up a few things, since I work with the Movable Type team. First, did you have a chance to take a look at the post that we wrote which started this whole conversation? Our goal was to highlight what our platform does particularly well — we were fair, even-handed, and asked for feedback if there were any factual errors. Unfortunately, the conversation turned into some kind of emotional slugfest, which wasn’t our intent, and which we haven’t gotten involved in. Please — read the post, and see if you think there’s anything “nasty” in it. I’d be surprised if you do, and you should judge for yourself.
Second, saying that MT users don’t know what TrackBack is is ridiculous — Movable Type is the platform that *invented* TrackBack and our company Six Apart first popularized it. If you want to talk about tech-savvy MT users, you can point at BoingBoing or O’Reilly Radar or ReadWriteWeb or any one of dozens of others. That’s not to mention enormous media properties from the Huffington Post to the Washington Post, which all use MT as well.
And finally, when it comes to commercial support, we wrote the book in many ways. MT was one of the earliest platforms to offer professional support, as well as one of the first to offer enterprise-grade backing for business blogs. The whole point in starting this conversation was to educate people about the platform, and I think if you read what we actually wrote, instead of second-hand spin about the post, you’d be pretty impressed. Again, we’re not interested in a petty shoving match in the blogosphere, we’re focused on makng great blogging tools, and our coders are busy adding exclusive features like Action Streams and OAuth and Fire Eagle support and the best OpenID integration in the business. (Oh yeah, and Six Apart is where OpenID was invented, too.) We’ll let developers on other platforms waste their time on bickering, but we will absolutely spend time showing people the work we’re proud of, too.