By: Nidhi Gupta

Many bloggers, when first setting things up, are faced with one of the most critical decisions any blogger can make, that is, which CMS to use? There are many out there, all with their respective pros and cons. Here, we’ll be looking at several key aspects pertaining to two of today’s premier content management systems: WordPress 2.2, and Movable Type 4.

Installation
Wordpress is famous for its “5 minute installation”, and once you’ve done it, anything slower will start feeling painful. All that’s needed is having an SQL database set up, unzipping of the WordPress zip (less than 1MB), editing the wp-config file, uploading it all to your server and running the install.php (note: takes a lot longer than 5 mins on first try).

One of the first things to be noticed in regards Movable Type is its relatively massive file size, 4MB – WordPress is only a quarter of the size. Relative to the file-size, it took a couple minutes to upload to the server. As for the actual installation, while it did go perfectly smoothly, there was a slight bit more technical knowledge needed.

Interface
In WordPress, the initial window you’re presented with is called the “Dashboard”. This provides you with plenty of useful information at-a-glance. Your last 5 posts, comments, blog stats, recent Technorati links, and Akismet spam count are all displayed there. The lower part of that screen also displays posts from the WordPress development blog, as well as “other WordPress news” and your recent drafts.

After you’ve looked through your Dashboard, you can click on any one of the tabs at the top: Write, Manage, Comments, Blogroll, Presentation, Plugins, Users, and Options. Each one of these pages is similarly laid out, coherent, consistent, and intuitive all the way around.

Now, on to Movable Type. Much like WordPress, you’re initially presented with a screen, also dubbed the “Dashboard”. Here, you’re presented with a more contextually oriented menu system in the top bar, which contains 5 main groups: Create, Edit, Organize, Design, and Config. This all integrates very smoothly and is a pleasure to use.

Source: Mashable.com

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