WordPress MU

I am a big fan of WordPress. I work at a company with many separate Fantastico installations of WordPress. It's become clear that this methodology is unruly, unmanageable, and far from centralized.

The natural progression would be to setup ONE install of WPMU and migrate all our current blogs over to it. However, the powers that be are also suggesting the use of Movable Type for our blogging platform.

I have setup both WPMU and MT on my personal PC to play around with. I have read articles comparing the two. I still find it difficult to come up with all the pros/cons and hopefully a convincing set of reasons to go with WPMU.

So I am asking you experts: what are the reasons a (fairly large) company should pick WordPress MU over Moveable Type for it's blogging platform?

Thanks in advance for any useful information.

I think I'd have to know more about how the company is using the blogs. :)

Obviously, I have a *preference*. :D

Our preference is the same =) . However, I am lacking the experience to make a deal sealing case.

There will be hundreds of blogs. Centralized control of themes and plugins, plus other site-wide goodies such as recent posts, popular posts, is of course an objective. I like WPMU because while global control is possible, individual blog customization is also available (especially with the addition of a plugin I started creating).

The blogs we currently have are always setup by an admin (not a regular user). However, there is a possibility that in the future we might open up blog creation to any of our users. If that were the case we'd definitely want a little stricter control over what they can change on their own blog. Stricter than "our" bloggers who we put more trust into.

Another future objective may be trying to integrate the blogging platform authentication with some other form of authentication (lets just call it a CMS for now).

Support might also be an issue. I'd like to believe that I can handle it all myself, however depending on how things go that may not be the case. Movable Type clearly has different levels of support (including enterprise) and seems well founded in that area. However, information on support for WordPress MU through Automattic seems more vague.

Personally speaking, I like PHP and the ability to customize. I dislike Perl. However, it does seem like MT has some features that are natively missing from WPMU.

However, the purpose of this post is to try to gather information on why WPMU trumps MT. Does any of this background help?

Thanks

OK, my 2 cents :)

First of all, it's Perl. I'm not starting a holywar here, but I DON'T LIKE PERL.
You'll have troubles maintaining MT because of Perl.

Second is scalability. Using multi-db for WPMU allows you to run a system of virtually any scale. And you can scale it any time you need :)

Third thing. Themes and add-ons. 80% of WP plugins and 90% of themes work with WPMU - so you can create blogging-cms-whatever system.

These are my preferences for WPMU.

Okay, I'll add more but it's been a while since I worked with MT.

- mapping domains on MT means you're sitting there making symlinks all day. WP, you make a couple server tweaks to start, then you can do the rest from the backend.

- the codebase of MT is 4 times the size of WP. Adn, you know, it's *perl*.

And I'll hit your boss where he'll understand: Can't get too far with MT support until you give them money, lots and lots of money.

With WP, there are a variety of consultants available for a wide range of budgets. You don't have to just get Automattic.

(go ahead, just go compare their support rates...)

I also believe MT's enterprise versions limit the amount of blogs you can make. WP doesn't.

Static files - MT write a file to disk for every single entry. And every archive page. WP is completely dynamic, but you can also get the WP-super-cache to write static files, so you have an option.

And last I checked, MT's templates are limited to template sets, which you them mostly tweak the CSS. Before, it was CSS-only.

With WP, pretty much anything is possible.

Yet another thing is integration with 3-rd party software.
You can integrate WPMU with virtually anything built on PHP/MySQL.
You'd hardly do this with MT...

It has been a while for Andrea. :)

symlinks

Nope, just create the addon domains within the hosting software and tell MT where to place the files. Almost same method as the original method of doing parked domains with mu.

The size of the codebase

*shrug* I don't see it as an issue myself.

perl

Only comes into play with rebuilds and saving the content. During regular page viewing, it's the static files. Perl doesn't come into play.

Blog count

Granted the enterprise version is a paid version with limits on the number of blogs but the open source version is free and it has no limit on blog or user quantity.

MT support

Just like wp, SixApart can serve as consultants. There's also community based forum support as well. Both for the Open Source and Paid versions.

Being honest though. Since you're doing this commercially, paid support is probably what you;re looking for. Most consultants for both platforms are 1 or 2 man operations. Automattic and SA are the big ones for both. Just wanted to throw that out there.

static files

MT has a php mode. You don't have to do it via a static site. You can even build a site with static files while including php includes for stuff like a Recent Posts list that can be updated without rebuilds. There are a couple of bugs though with them currently.

Templates

The ones that comes from the MT website and many of the ones available from the net are css based. You can modify the underlying code though via tags. MT does have widgets as well. Same general usage as wp and wpmu. You can modify them from within MT though while wp's widgets, you have to access the files via whatever server or hosting backend you;re using.

Centralized control

MT does have a backend that does do this but I have to admit that I like wpmu's better. Plugins and themes in MT are turned on sitewide, not just on a per blog like mu. Not sure about the Recent Posts and whatnot lists for MT.

Having said all that, the question that comes to my mind is who's going to use the site. If all of your writers are going to be in house, I'd lean more towards MT. If you're going to run more of a general site where anyone can sign up and create their own blogs, I'd lean more towards mu.

No matter what platform you use, you;re going to have to worry about maintenance and coding and upgrading and what not.

Hope this helps

Why WordPress MU is better:

• WordPress MU allows users to create their own blogs while MT allows only one user to create blogs
• WordPress MU can be integrated into bbPress forums whlie MT can't
• Almost any theme for the regular WordPress can work with WordPress MU (which has thousands of millions of themes) while MT doesn't have much themes out there
• WordPress MU is written in PHP, a dynamic and popular programing language for web applications. MT is written in Perl, which is difficult to edit
• WordPress MU stores the data into the database (files are kept physically). MT creates static HTML files outside the database

That's why I chose WordPress over MT.

1) Actually all users can create blogs with MT, not just the admin users. It's up to the admin user to make that choice though if they want to allow that option.

2) Actually you can run MT with BBpress. MT has a built in forum option though which is why most folks go with that.

3) On the MT package I roll out to my clients, there's just under 600 themes included. edit: Many of the wordpress themes are really copies of each other anyway.

4) To each their own. Sounds more like a personal preference to me. I grew up with Turbo Pascal. Coming from that, I don't think much of the logic that php uses but that's just me.

5) As noted up above, MT also has a php mode.

It would be a plus if you;re going to list points between platforms, you please make sure the points you list are correct. Each platform has it;s own pluses and minuses and are best for specific tasks. I use wordpress for some users, MT for other, and even other platforms for others. Each situation depends on the task.