I’d like to know others opinions on this also.

I’ll be keeping track of this post.

Although it’s too early to make an informed comparison between WordPress and MT, I wanted to see what all the fuss was about myself.
I’ve had a copy of WordPress running locally for the last few days. It’s very easy to setup if your running a local server with MySQL. So far so good though, the major difference on first look is the complete lack of any templates other than the index. If you know your way around PHP then you shouldn’t have any trouble customising the look and function of your blog.

The other major difference on first inspection is how easy it is to configure – stuff that would probably take quite a bit of hacking in MT can be adjusted easily from the admin options: RSS, link lists etc are all managed from dropdown options.

All in all, first impressions are good and if nothing else I’ve got quite a nifty task manager

Well, a lot of my site is generated with PHP as-is. I wanted to save MT some hassle after my MT installation freaked out last December. I suppose I might give it a whirl locally to see how it works.

I’d still be interested in finding out more about it if anyone else has some insight.

I’ve been using WordPress for some time on my site and I’ve been very pleased with it. WP has always been reliable and stable for me. It does what you ask of it with as little fuss as possible. I have not used MT in quite a while so I can’t provide a good comparison for you. I can, however, point out some of the things that I have found to be helpful to me.

1) Standards-abiding output… Everything is automatically setup to create valid xhtml. A good example is that paragraph tags are automatically generated instead of double line breaks.

2) PHP oriented… Everything is done by calling PHP functions. I was never too thrilled with the markup I had to use in other CMSes like greymatter (that sure dates me).

3) Easy modification… It’s generally expected that if an option isn’t available, it should be possible to implement that option with a minimum amount of fuss. You can create new functions and then place them in wp-hacks.php (I think that’s the name of the file). You can then invoke your new function without messing with any of the actual WP essential coding.

4) Absurdley simple installation… There’s no thinking involved in the actual installation. My cat could install WordPress. All you have to do is edit the config file before installing.

5) Link management… Link management is built right into WP. It’s possible to import lists with OPML, as well. I like the in-built option to list recently updated links.

6) Regularly increasing functionality… More and more options keep popping up with each release. Caching and uploading files are the big upcoming projects for WP 1.1.

Of course, nothing is perfect. I have had some long standing issues with WP.

1)Documentation has been fairly limited until recently with the creation of the http://wiki.wordpress.com wiki.

2) The support forum is also a little lacking (I’m used to gentoo’s forums which a much easier for me to use).

3) There aren’t all that many functions regarding archives at this point. Mostly just generating a list of links to archives by year, month, week and day. There are a few people working on different hacks for this at the moment.

In any case, I recommend setting up a copy and trying it for yourself. That’s the real test. If you don’t happen to have a local folder, just install WP to a subfolder on your public webserver and restrict access with .htaccess.

I’m testing WordPress 1.0.1 on my home localhost (WAMP) by now. Works faster than MT, is easy to install, conigure and customize.

I opted for WP when I started my blog a month or so ago, mainly because, despite the fact that I’ve wanted to for a while, I simply do not have the time to write my own CMS. Most of my server-side programming experience is in PHP, and I knew I would want to tweak and fiddle with the code, so WP was the natural choice.

I have no experience with MT, so I can’t offer comparison, but so far, I have been very impressed with all that WP can do. My favorite feature by far is the out-of-the-box support for web standards. I have not delved deeply into the hacks file (so far I have been hacking the WP files themselves, which is actually not too hairy), but it sounds quite useful.

Things I don’t like:

1. No comment previewing (trying to hack this in at the moment)

2. No blacklisting (there may be a plugin for this, I have not searched deeply)

3. No way to keep visitor’s email address off of the comments if they don’t input a URL. This was one of the first things I hacked in.

Jump!!! you won’t believe how fast it is to install, how easy it is to use and how easy it is to control your templates. I totally like wordpress over mt.

Well, what about MT 3.0? It’s supposed to have some nifty new features, but who knows how far away it’s going to be?

I’m in the process of a redesign right now (along with my web design business section), and I’m wondering if I should hold out for MT 3.0 or jump ship to WP 1.0.1. There are some nifty plug-ins for MT though which are part of the reason why I’ve waited so far.

On the other hand, some plug-ins should be fairly easy to convert to a PHP-based system like WP. So, I’m wondering. I’ll probably install a development version to test it out. If it’s fast and doesn’t cause my server many headaches, then I think I will jump. I’m also going to contact the developers of the plug-ins I use to see what the chances are of coming up with WP-compatible ones.

It might well be worth taking a look at Dean Allen’s Textpattern http://textpattern.com/
It’s just gone into public beta and looks to have some great features.

I think I’ll be jumping ship to WordPress for sure now, I never realised how much extra work is involved in with rebuilds everytime I change a template, everytime I edit a post, everytime I remove a comment etc…

Been running a private installation on my server and it imported my MT entries and comments fine.

I may move back to MT when its released at version 3.0… I’ll weigh up the difference in features at that time.

Yeah, I’d say I have to agree. The more I think about it, the more I realize how much easier I think it would be. There are a few new features I’ve been wanting to implement, including more integration and reliance on XML, RSS, OPML, and other related technologies.

I don’t know a lick of Perl, but I’m getting the hang of PHP and parsing XML documents with it. I’ll plan to debut the new version of this site with WordPress.

Had a spare hour or two this morning and decided that if I didn’t “jump” now that it’d take a few weeks before I get that sort of free time again.

I’m using a template borrowed from the WP CSS Competition until I get time to move to the design I’ve been working on.

Already loving the speed of updating/posting etc.

Imported all my entries, and then ran a SQL statement on the database to make me the “author”… as the MT Import creates another user and assigns all posts to it.

Basically, a good read of the WP support forum when you come accross a problem, and then just general common sense and moving to WP isn’t that hard.

Just thought I’d keep you up to date.

Looking forward to your redesign Ryan… so keep an eye out for mine in the future.

Thanks.

I will. Can’t wait.