make way Movable Type
Posted on | May 13, 2004 |
Movable Type has been good to me. But lately, it just hasn’t been up to snuff. I’m sick of only being able to use it in IE (I’m not sure why, but nothing works in Firefox). I’m sick of strange rebuilding errors. I want to save something and have it appear on my site without having to rebuild. I want something written in PHP. I want something everyone else ISN’T using (it’s the rebel in me).
Don’t get me wrong, Movable Type is a great tool. I’ve just decided to move on.
I started this post in late April and never finished it. But, given Six Apart’s announcements today, I felt the need to finish it.
The announcements basically mean that if I want to continue using MT the way I do today and ever wish to upgrade to 3.0, I will need to dole out at least $150 ($120 if I catch it at the introductory price).
“So,” you might say, “you’ve been using MT for free for 10 months and now that they want you to pay for it, you’re upset.” I do not begrudge Six Apart wanting to support an MT development team. It’s just further confirmation that my decision to move to Wordpress or make my own is the right decision.
The problem is that I am not locked into MT as some end users are. I am a web programmer. I can use WordPress and add code to do what it won’t, if necessary. (Although, I doubt I will need to as their dev blog makes me expect a super new feature rich Wordpress 1.2).
This is also what my conscience is telling me. I want to use open source software to power my blog. I also want to contribute to that community. I may drop a little change into the Six Apart collection jar as I exit, but I’m looking forward to supporting an open source weblogging system.
Now, I just need to wait a week to see what WordPress 1.2 has for me.
Update: This blog does a pretty good analysis of pricing vs. what the average MT user is willing to pay.
Update: The Six Apart announcement has been slashdotted, and the Six Apart website is suffering from the Slashdot Effect.
Update: I want to clarify that I am not absolutely opposed to paying for MT3. Maybe I would pay $70 to have a non-conditional personal license (i.e. as many weblogs and authors I want — for personal use). But I would have to pay a lot more than that to get the functionality I currently have, thus the tiered personal license structure seems hokie to me. Jason Kottke explains my feelings on the personal license structure much better than I ever could.
Comments
2 Responses to “make way Movable Type”
May 13th, 2004 @ 10:08 pm
And another thought: Let’s say I wanted to set up a family blog (okay, it already exists, I’ve just never finished it) with the idea of maintaining communication among family members scattered throughout the United States and the world. And then let’s say there would be perhaps 10-20 family members participating and, of course, adding blog entries about their lives, loves, etc. Now let’s say I had to fit that model within the MT pricing scheme.
Good luck. I’m not ponying up $700 ($600 if I act fast).
May 14th, 2004 @ 6:21 am
I have found b2evolution to fit my clients needs for a GPLed weblog using PHP/mySQL. Wordpress has also been very impressive, though I am not sure how I feel about its template management. Please let me know how your experience goes, and if you have any success/sob stories moving MT data into a new system.
Like you, I can’t cough up cash on demand for software when alternatives are available to do the same job. I adopted Movable Type when PHP was version 3 and there was no software for it. Now with the development span of PHP 4, applications have come out that do everything from parse XML to walk your dog. PHP has in many ways replaced PERL as the swiss-army knife of web development. It’s a shame MT never saw it coming. I look forward to my eventual migration.
(link followed from discussion on Mike Rundle’s blog)