Mike’s post at Business Logs announcing their latest design project (a redesign of A Socialite’s Life) has an interesting commentary comparing Movable Type and WordPress – specifically with the dynamic nature of WP and the need to ‘rebuild’ MT.
‘I now realize why larger weblogs are switching to WordPress — when a site posts a dozen or more entries per day for the past few years, rebuilding the individual entry archives takes a long time. A long, long time. About 32 minutes each rebuild. There is now an option in the newer version of Movable Type to switch to dynamic publishing (aka each individual entry archive request is retrieved from the database dynamically, no static files, like WordPress) but turning the option on and getting it working is not really something a non-technical person can accomplish. WordPress has dynamic publishing on by default (I’m not a WP expert, but I don’t think you can turn it off, not that you’d really want to) so it’s easier for a novice user to setup dynamic publishing using WordPress than with Movable Type.’
This is a difference that has made me start all my newer blogs with WP. There’s nothing worse than having to do a half hour rebuild (it can take longer some days) to make a small change in a sidebar or header. I love some of MT’s features but if you’re going to grow a large site over time you either need to work out how to make it dynamic (beyond me) or consider a dynamic platform.
Update: Mike’s written a great post as a followup that compares Movable Type and WordPress in quite a bit of detail.
