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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However, drop down contextual menus can be inefficient obstacles at times, such as when you want to click the home icon, but you’ve already unwillingly extended the blog menu.

All in all, both Wordpress and Movable Type were built with the end-user in mind and thus are continually improving their interfaces. Both are similarly equipped with intuitive admin areas, and neither have much of a learning curve. However, Wordpress comes out on top with its relatively quicker access to vital information and lack of annoying contextual menus.

Winner: Wordpress.

Customization
The Wordpress community is both large and talented. Themes and plugins are easily located on their respective directory pages on the Wordpress site. The variety and quality in both categories is difficult to surpass. Even if you’re not content with something you find, enterprising web developers and newbies alike can easily create themes and plugins with the easy to use and well implemented Codex. It does, however, require a little technical knowledge to work confidently with themes and plugins.

On the opposite side of the fence, Movable Type is a comparably customizable system. Its community has also been proactive in the creation of plugins and themes can easily be found in their respective directories. If you wish to create your own customization tools, like Wordpress, Six Apart’s done a great job of documenting all of the Developer info, so take a look if you’re into that stuff.

Winner: Tie.

Affordability and Accessibility
Wordpress has always taken pride in its open-source architecture which not only provides for more active, critical development and better documentation, but also affordability. Wordpress only offers a free version, which is bundled with support from their great, knowledgeable community by means of their forums, IRC and other venues. MTOS (The Movable Type Open Source Project), provides an open source version of the Movable Type platform as a core for all other products. The project is set to launch in the 3rd quarter of this year, and will rely upon Movable Type’s already large development community. In terms of pricing, they offer their personal edition for free, and they offer enterprise, education, nonprofit and hosted solutions for a substantial cost. All of their paid packages also come with commercial support, which is great for organizations that don’t want to take on the role of tech expert when something goes wrong.

Winner: Wordpress.

Stability
The stability of Movable Type and Wordpress is quite debatable. After all, the main issues most people will encounter are those server-related, it’s very rarely the CMS.

Winner: Tie.

Additional Features
There are a few things in Wordpress which are not in MT: combining trackbacks and comments, RSS for comments, and permalinks for comments, for example.

However, there are also a couple of points to the contrary: Page generation for every request can get a bit slow and Kubrick (Wordpress’s default theme) has many problems, from images to CSS. In addition, Movable Type 4 introduces some features which take it beyond the call of duty. These include: OpenID, Admin XML Feeds, cross-blog aggregation, and more. Virtually anything can be done with Wordpress plugins, of course, but with Movable type it’s all built in.

Winner: Movable Type.

The Final Decision
After tallying it all up, Wordpress comes out on top beating Movable Type in many areas.
Overall, Movable Type is a well put-together offering by SixApart definitely warranting a try: we’d say it’s actually superior for no-nonsense business people who want a professional solution fast. However, Wordpress is the stronger offering for the general user with great features and an unsurpassed community.

In a few months, as Movable Type heads towards greater openness, we think the gap will be closed. MT will certainly be worth another look around that time. And frankly, if you plan to spend many years with your blog platform of choice, why not try out both and see which one you prefer?

Let us know your thoughts on how these platforms stack up.