What is the Big Deal with MT?

Mar 03, 2003 12:11 PM
Tags: coldfusion, movabletype

John figures out how to do something in Movable Type that should be trivial. But, as he says (using the acronym tag, to boot!) it's not possible with the out-of-the-box installation of MT.

I also thought it was pretty cool, but then I wondered why. After all, I have a love-hate relationship with another tag-based web programming tool — ColdFusion — and that's been able to do such things for at least the 3.5 years I've been using it.

James admits he likes CF. And, detractors aside, it does have its strengths: it has the fastest prototype-to-working time, it's very easy to learn for people who just know HTML, it comes with out-of-the-box with various tools (a web-based administrative panel) and utilities (can send email or upload files).

Why then, does CF get bashed relentlessly, while MT is adored?

Here are my thoughts:

Movable Type is free in both senses. Anyone can download a copy and install it on their server. CFMX Server Professional (the cheapest version) will set you back $1,299 (enterprise edition is $5k). Not feasible for personal sites. Also, the entirety of MT software is open source. The advantages and disadvantages of this are another topic entirely. ColdFusion is published by Allaire, and now Macromedia, and lacks that edge in image, if nothing else.

Second, MT is not just a platform (in fact, it's secondarily so), it's an application. Out of the box, you have a working weblog that you can start customizing. With ColdFusion, you have to roll your own.

"Big deal," you say? Not really, I admit — any decent programmer can make their own content-management system. In fact, I did one for my first program (in CF 4.5, no less). And back then, I didn't know shit about programming. But have the playa-haters built this trivially-easy system? And was it easily installed, cross-platform, well-tested and including features like comments, searching, categories, calendars, titles and trackback, which even Blogger omits? Probably not. What about a robust, attractive administrative website? I doubt it. And a head start (e.g. using MT as a starting point) always helps.

Last, but not least, is the terms on which we judge them. Movable Type has the relative luxury of being lumped in with Blogger, LiveJournal and Radio UserLand. ColdFusion has the misfortune of having to compete with PHP, ASP, JSP, et al.


Comments: What is the Big Deal with MT?

Like you said it's not a very good comparison. I love Movable Type, but I always complain that its authored in PERL, if it was CF or PHP I could easily customize it without knowing much of either, but even the basics of PERL are such a horrid mess, my mind can't wrap around it. CF is a designers tool for light programming, with some hardcore users who really know what they are doing, while PHP and such are intimidating to the less Scripting inclined.

Posted by: James on March 3, 2003 5:27 PM | permalink

IMHO, there was too little in the way of CF "hacking" if you wanted to do something new and innovative, beyond what Allaire/Macromedia gave you. No user-defined functions until version 5 (!) and if you think Perl is intimidating, imagine rolling your own CF stuff in C++. Alternatively, you could have written a COM object or a Java Servlet, but at that point, why use CF?

Posted by: Joe Grossberg on March 3, 2003 6:42 PM | permalink

True MT is an application but most importantly it has an extensible architecture and there are people developing plugins that others can easily incorporate - very much like the success of the Palm architecture - once you have a community of devlopers improving the product you have some power indeed. People like James may not like that it's done in Perl because they want to get deep into it and customize it themselves while others like me (who pines for my coding days) knows enough to integrate some tags to craft what they want without having to understand the internals.

An application with such a developer following is powerful indeed.

Posted by: john on March 3, 2003 11:17 PM | permalink

No more comments! Either someone has violated Godwin's Law, I'm tired of the discussion or, most likely, the ten-week window has closed. You can, however, contact me through email.