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Why Wordpress is still the best

July 15th, 2005
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If you read some of my posts (notably this one from the 29th of June and this one from the 12th of June), you’ll probably wonder why I’m still using Wordpress. The simple reason is that I like results, and Wordpress is the best around. To prove my point (or at least rant about it :P ) I’ll tell you why (I think) Wordpress is superior to its main competitors.

Drupal

  • Cumbersome. I tried setting up Drupal for someone else, and just using it was an incredibly cumbersome process (for a relatively advanced computer user like me).
  • Not designed for the job. Although it loves to pretend otherwise, Drupal isn’t really a blogging system, more like a PHP-Nuke clone with comments bolted on. Trackback isn’t even in the core code. Get real!

  • Smaller userbase. Popularity isn’t everything, but less users means less modifiers, which in turns means less themes/plugins etc. as there just aren’t as many people capable of creating them.

    • Movable Type

    • CGI/Perl-based. My blog has over 200 posts. In my brief flirtation with a transfer to Movable Type (see the 12th of June post I mentioned earlier), it took an absolute age to add any more. The reason was that it had to rebuild every single file in the publicly-accessible section of the site when I wrote one article. Wordpress, on the other hand, uses dynamically-generated (by PHP) pages, so it doesn’t have to create them in advance- if I change anything then the database record is updated, and therefore anyone who goes to the page for it will see the new version automatically.

  • Proprietary license. With the free version, you can only have one blog and one author (and they can add more restrictions any time they like). Wordpress on the other hand is licensed under the GPL, so even if the developers wanted to make the license more restrictive they couldn’t.

  • Ugly. Seriously, have you seen MT’s default template recently? Kubrick beats it into the ground, and Wordpress has a great deal of other themes available (such as the one I’m using) to let you get the look you want, whereas MT (due to the licensing restrictions) has very few.

    • Textpattern
    This one looks interesting, but it isn’t far enough along in development to be a viable option, partially because of reliability issues (Wordpress clogged my server with 13Mb coredumps when it had an error, I hate to think what a less-tested system will do) but also because of the same userbase problem as with Drupal- it just doesn’t have enough people developing addons (such as themes, plugins etc.) for it, and the lack of a large community means that the core software itself is actually quite simplistic (not good enough for a ‘production’ blog IMHO).

    So why Wordpress?
    This isn’t just a negative rejection of the other packages available, there are a great deal of things that attract me to Wordpress- the easy-to-use interface, the great extensibility, the fact that the templates aren’t gibberish to anyone who doesn’t have a degree in PHP- which combined to make it a fantastic platform to blog with, and one that I can reccomend to anyone.

    Author: David Russell Categories: Blogging Tags:
    1. Seb
      July 17th, 2005 at 22:07 | #1
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      Movable Type creates also dynamic pages. So your argument isn’t right.

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