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In which I consider the WordPress exodus.

But she's a girl: Why WordPress? via birdhouse.org: MovableType 3 Sting

Movabletype (MT) and WordPress (WP) have a lot of similarities (indeed, many of the new features I've included in my new design could have been accomplished with MT), but one fundamental difference: MT produces static web pages, and WP produces dynamic ones. This difference is an important one; every time the content of the page needs to change in a static system (which can happen quite frequently with a weblog with comments, trackbacks and so on), the entire page needs to be rebuilt. If you have monthly and category archives, those pages need to be rebuilt too. Rebuilding is pretty speedy when you have a small number of posts, but it gets slower as time goes on and you accumulate more content. However, with a dynamic system, the changes are made the instant someone reloads the page.

I haven't really considered this point before, but reading it now it makes a lot of sense. dynamic db-backed systems make a lot of sense for me, especially for content which changes fairly frequently.

Also given the whole GPL vs proprietary distinction, I have to say that WordPress is starting to look better and better. I installed it on my laptop copuple weeks ago. I've played with it, but haven't really had time to go into it. I'm off to Ireland next week, so it'll have to wait till I get back - I don't even want to think about migration, though from reading the birdhouse.org post, I get the idea that it's pretty doable (i.e. other people have already done it, you lazy bastard.) And it's just the one blog I'm moving anyway.

Posted by John on June 4, 2004 11:29 AM |

Comments

The roomie (http://www.thecyberwolfe.com/blog/) raved about how quick and easy it was to not only set up WP but also migrate his MT content.

As for me... well, I've always been on a DB-driven, dynamically adaptive system (http://monauraljerk.org/). Heh.

Posted by: GreyDuck | June 4, 2004 12:39 PM

The dynamic vs static thing is definitely the biggest mindset difference between the two. Mentioned it here: http://www.goesping.org/index.php?p=23 It's something everybody who switches has to think about. It may be more welcome to some than others. I like it, personally.

Posted by: Ed Heil | June 4, 2004 5:16 PM

there are many advantages to the static page creation. the only time you really are rebuilding a lot of pages is when you start mucking with the templates. the dynamic thing seems exciting and fun, but if you start doing any load-testing on your server, you'll realize that apache is far faster at throwing out pages than php/mysql will ever be. this is why the first real CMS systems like vignette would literally brute-force generate every possible variant of a page, no matter how complicated or inter-linked. when you see a vignette site, and its got those crazy numbers up in the url, they all mean something to the server.

anyway, imo, that's an under-educated reason to leave MT. if there's some features that you want that it doesn't have and you don't have the kung foo to write the plugin, then switch. ;)

Posted by: b | June 6, 2004 11:04 AM

interesting post, b. Good points. I'll think about that as well. I work for a site that uses jsp, but only as server-side includes, for just that reason - server load.

Posted by: jbm | June 6, 2004 11:38 AM