Movable Type 3.0 Developer Edition

There has been a lot of controversy/hype/anger/apathy surrounding the recent release of Movable Type 3.0 Developer Edition. I must admit that I’m lumped in with the apathetic crowd. Because I only run one weblog through the system (perhaps two in the near future, I’m still debating that), I’m not affected at all by the new pricing scheme (i.e., for my uses, it remains free), which is the impetus behind all of those who are ‘angry.’

That said, I upgraded to v3.0D a couple of weeks ago and have experienced no trouble at all (including no plugin hiccups). Besides some subtle interface design changes, there really is nothing aesthetically different from past versions. I knew this going into the upgrade and am well aware of the changes to the ‘guts’ of the system, but I was still expecting something more. Notwithstanding the lack of feature updates, I see no reason to stop using Movable Type — I still feel that no other CMS comes close.

For kicks, I installed WordPress a few weeks ago and messed around with it for a while, but its interface did nothing for me nor were its features on par with Movable Type’s. To be fair, I was running v1.0.2, but v1.2 was released a few days ago, which might have fixed some of the things I didn’t like; I’ll probably play around with the new version sometime this week. Adding to Movable Type’s pull on me is the number of plugins available for it. Not to be left out, WordPress also offers the ability to easily create plugins for the system, but its repository is currently much smaller; granted, WordPress’s user base is much smaller and it’s only been out a short while compared to Movable Type.

To be clear though, if it turned out that the new Movable Type pricing scheme required me to pay for it, I would probably get past my hang-ups with WordPress and begin using it, which seems to be the attitude of most of those who are now forced to pay for v3.0D upgrades. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t pay for Movable Type (as I’ve said many times before, it’s one of the greatest pieces of software I’ve ever used), but if there is another [free] solution available that can do everything that Movable Type can do, logic dictates that I would opt for the other solution. shrug