Adaptive Path Blog

Lately there’s been a little bit of noise about the fact that we chose Wordpress as the platform for this here weblog, even though historically we’ve been a Movable Type kind of company. Just to clear some stuff up: Our main site’s still powered by, and will continue to be powered by, Movable Type. Thing is, when you’ve got friends all over the Internet (and all over the companies that power it), you’ve got to spread the love around. Wordpress, Movable Type, and my own personal site runs on Blogger. Who knows? Maybe we’ll rearchitect with Drupal next. Gotta keep it interesting.

Still, equal opportunity was only one consideration we used when picking Wordpress. At AP, we’re deeply technology-agnostic, because we firmly believe that technology should enable the choices you make, not constrain them. Too many firms buy into expensive applications expecting quick fixes and miracle solutions, an approach that never works; instead, take the time to understand what your current situation is and what your real needs are, then choose a platform that aligns with those needs. People and process first, then technology.

And in that spirit, an explanation of why in this instance Wordpress was the deliberate choice for the AP weblog:

Pricing. They’re gonna smack me for saying this, but despite some strides made since they first introduced it, MT’s pricing system is still more confusing than it needs to be. This page, in particular, leaves me scratching my head (it’s not that I can’t figure it out, it’s that I shouldn’t have to work so hard!) Given that everybody in the company can post, I think we would have had to spent $600 to run MT in this case (assuming we upgraded from version 2, which we’re still running on our site, though hopefully not much longer.) Wordpress, open-source, is free. Advantage: Wordpress.

Multi-blog support. One install of MT can power many weblogs, whereas Wordpress, as far as I can tell, supports only one per install. Wacky. MT’s had this support forever, and this is one of the big reasons we use MT as the CMS for the AP site. Advantage: Movable Type, though since we’re only doing a single group blog, Wordpress is fine in this instance.

Backend integration. Sure, we don’t have much of a backend, but we do have one (and, actually, a lot of it was written by Ben Trott pre-SixApart!) David Verba, our tech director and manager of all things AP-Internet-related, is a perl guy at heart — points in favor of MT — but he’s smart and flexible and knows his LAMP, so PHP-based Wordpress isn’t a problem. Advantage: MT, but really it’s a wash.

Healthy competition. We love a good technology ecosystem. Competition keeps companies on their toes, especially young and hungry ones. We appreciate our competitors, just like I’m sure MT and Wordpress appreciate each other. In the end, the customers win! For us, given this, advantage: Wordpress, but points to both companies for contributing to such a rich cultural and technical environment.

All other things being equal — including two incredibly robust third-party plug-in developer communities, and a similar level of awkward interface heaviness (oh, how I miss the day when the entire Blogger app was one framed page!) — we leaned on our propensity for sharing the love and went with Wordpress. Bearing in mind that MT continues to amaze me with its flexibility as a small-scale CMS for the AP site, which I’m sure will only improve once we finally install MT3.

Conclusion: So far, so good! We still love Movable Type! Blogger is super-easy to use! Drupal rocks! Be my MySpace friend! I love your Flickr stream! BFF, everybody, ok?

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 18th, 2006 at 9:08 am and is filed under Adaptive Path, Product Design, Web Applications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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