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Law blogs : Movable Type or WordPress?

There's a decent discussion going on over at ProBlogger about what's better for blog software, Movable Type (MT) or WordPress.

As you'll see from the discussion, there's a lot of bent up anger against Six Apart produced Movable Type. This is the result of Six Apart's decision last year to start charging for MT version 3.0 and additional fees for additional blog authors. Frankly, to sustain decent software and the company's employed developers, it made sense to start charging. But that did not sit well with many good open source developers who have now gone over to WordPress.

Bottom line, if you're working with good blog sofware, whether it be MT, WordPress or something else, it's a good idea to have developers and programers available to pitch in. Blog software is constantly being upgraded and the upgrades always need to be tested with various modifications that may have been made to the software earlier. If you have some crack developers working on your system to get you the features you need, you should be okay.

LexBlog uses MT because Six Apart offered a more mature development community, including both developers employed by Six Apart and those using MT on their own, at the time we began offering our turnkey solution to lawyers.

We've made a lot of changes to the MT platform to better serve our clients. LexBlog's also accumulated a lot of intellectual capital as to the inner workings of MT. We've overcome many of the problems mentioned at ProBlogger and feel good about the platform we're offering to law firms.

WordPress is pretty good software and who knows, it may be used by more folks than MT down the road. But for now, LexBlog is sticking with a proven commodity.

  • http://photomatt.net/ Matt

    According to Technorati, WordPress has over 150,000 public blogs, compared to about 60,000 public MT blogs. 1.5 has been downloaded over 330,000 times from wordpress.org, and WP is integrated with a number of hosting services as a one-click install. There are well over 300 plugins and hundreds of themes can serve as a base for development, and it is used by people as diverse as Rosie O'Donnell to CNET Networks. There are plenty of good reasons not to use WordPress, but lack of maturity is not one of them.

  • http://www.jayallen.org Jay Allen

    Matt, reading up, it looks like Kevin said “a more mature development community” not a more mature piece of software.
    Also, I'm curious as to how you got your numbers from Technorati. 60,000 public MT blogs is a very low estimate by all accounts.
    Anyway, Kevin, I'm glad you're happy with MT and I look forward to delighting you in the future.

  • http://kevin.lexblog.com Kevin O'Keefe

    Matt, don't get me wrong I think WordPress is a great piece of software. We dam near went with it as I explored things at the end of 2003. As far as maturity, like Jay said, I was not referring to the software, I was referring to the number of developers working with WordPress v. MT at the end of 2003/beginning of 2004.
    You were just kicking WordPress up to higher level and I could see a lot of good things coming. It was just gut decision on my part at that time that our company would be better served with MT. So far we've stuck with it, not without some challenges along the way and some desired features WordPress has that MT does not. So who knows there may be a time when we'll be using WordPress.
    As far as numbers of users I have no idea. One thing I am seeing a ton of is the use of blog software by search engine spammers to archive meaningless feeds from other blogs or to post some gibberish that appears relavant to their client's business along with links to their client's site. I have seen more of those on blogger and WordPress than MT, probably because of cost of MT. But again, I have no hard info on users nor do I feel capable of commenting on that.