Stay on Movable Type or move to WordPress or Drupal?

When we first started Technology Evangelist a little over a year ago we knew we wanted to get into video blogging so we chose a platform that had a pretty good architecture for it: Movable Type. Through plugins we have been able to get some pretty good looking video online, but when we started getting Dugg the problems with Movable Type started shining through.

Now we're trying to re-analyze that decision. When we got Dugg at CES the poor dynamic coding of Movable Type was made very apparent. Our system was hitting the hard drive 40,000 per second with I/O requests, many of which were very unnecessary. Since Movable Type does not seem to have a caching system we were forced to move to static mode which makes posting a very long and painful process.

I'm wondering what the best platform for us may be. We're testing WordPress and I've played with Drupal, but I wanted to post this question to the blogosphere. Which platform should we use to help us accomplish the following:

Video and Podcasting support
Dynamic page generation
Caching support (we want to cache as much as possible and run from RAM if we can)
Good comment spam filtering
Multiple authors
Fairly easy to use for authors (admins don't matter on this front)

Thoughts? WordPress with a few nifty plugins is starting to look really nice, but I fear we'll just run into a slew of different problems if we migrate over. What would you do in our shoes?

Wordpress has a plugin called WP-Cache which many have had a lot of success of surviving a Digg.

I keep it installed, but haven't had the Digg "problem" yet to truly test out it! :)

We're playing with WordPress in our staging area now and have WP-Cache installed. As you say though, it's hard to test without load so I'm not sure how well it's going to perform.

We have a great host (Media Temple) who can take the load. We've got the largest account they offer next only to custom solutions, so I think the hardware is in place. It's that darned database that gets me every time when in dynamic mode. I feel like I need a better caching option, maybe I'm not looking hard enough and should think outside the box a bit...

Hi Benjamin, I work with the Movable Type team, and I might be able to provide you with some info or ideas that might help show why MT can be a good choice for you, assuming it's properly configured.

The truth of the matter is, to really scale to a Digg-size audience, you want the most resilient architecture possible. Static pages (which Movable Type can generate by default) are going to scale the best, and don't require you to install any caching infrastructure. There are plugins to eliminate rebuilding (MT-Burn and Rebuild Queue, most notably) if you're concerned about posting taking longer.

More importantly, you can connect with a community of people who are solving these same problems for sites as enormous as the Huffington Post or the Washington Post. You can get a feel for that on the Movable Type wiki with the system architecture and performance tuning documents available there.

I think your best option is what's called "lazy building" of static pages. It's the scalability of static pages with the performance of dynamic, and doesn't require creating a caching layer.

There are many benefits to that option with Movable Type, but off the top of my head, here's some key ones:
* No need to recreate all of your templates, styles, themes, or CSS
* Ability to create multiple blogs and manage them (and all your authors) in one place
* Professional support direct from the people who make the tools
* Peers who are making large-scale sites. (More of the Technorati Top 100 blogs run on Movable Type and TypePad than on every other tool combined)
* Faster access to updates: Movable Type and Movable Type Enterprise have been updated half a dozen times since the last major WordPress release.

In short, wait 'til you see the improvements we're making to static publishing, and do feel free to look at the latest nightly beta builds, which show off the new asset management system coming to Movable Type. I use it every day and can't imagine how I got by without it. :)

I ran my blog on MT for a long time and was quite experienced in hacking and tweaking it. But over time, MT gets worse and worse. It's actually a lot like Windows; it works nicely when first installed, but the bigger its gets and the longer it goes, the worse the performance. I mean, it was taking about 60 seconds just to post an entry. I got fed up.

But I highly recommend you move to Wordpress. I'm not that familiar with Drupal, but it seems to shine on community-oriented sites, not blogs. WP beats it for a pure blog platform.

The WP community is vibrant and supportive -- exactly what the MT community was before (a) Six Apart changed the licensing, and (b) the MT old-timers got sick of their blogs performing so poorly.

WP is easy to hack, has tons of plugins, and is very scalable with WP-Cache. If you have any questions, feel free to shoot them my way.

Drupal rocks. Sure you could use Wordpress or Movable Type, but Drupal is where it's at if you want to support a community.

I don't know anything about tech stuff- I am just a online sales guy that has played with wordpress and drupal from my own stuff.

Drupal 5.0 installs in about 2 seconds, and I have been able to configure and manipulate very easialy.

Also- my last company was a large b2b publisher and they were looking for a new CMS tool and their choices came down to Drupal and Plone. They are going with Plone- simply for some enterprise wide features- but they fact that they considered Drupal I think speaks well- especially for its web 2.0 capabilities.

I also believe your host has some strength there with Drupal - I have looked at them for possibly hosting solutions.

I'm a fan of WordPress and Drupal. I've been running a videoblog site for more than a year on WordPress and it works very weii. Spam catching through Akismet is also good. That said, Drupal is a great platform to build upon. I think it may be a step behind WordPress as far as general blogging/podcasting/videoblogging features and support, but that could change quickly. I have not used WordPress for multiple authors as I have with Drupal. Hmmm, all that said, I think you could make either system work for you. Both are easy enough to set up and test, so give them both a spin if you have the time.

hey there..
i used to use blogger for start..
but when i found out about wordpress, there's no turning back..
it's easy to install and configure..
any problems there's always wordpress support which you can find most of the solutions if you search..
there are so many plugins too choose from..
so basically yeah..
i love wordpress!

I would go by the Joomla Way ! Joomla.org would perfectly suit your needs :) good luck !

Benjamin, I work with Anil as the Product Manager for Movable Type. I am the author of a number of notable plugins for the platform, and I routinely make myself available to people who want a tune up for their blog and MT install.

* integrated FastCGI supports which yields a 15x performance boost
* RebuildQueue for crazy fast rebuilding in the most scalable way
* CatCalendar - yet another way to speed up rebuilding by creating date based category archives

If you would like any hands-on help I would be happy to volunteer - for you or any of your readers. You can reach me via email (byrne at sixapart dot com), or via AIM at byrnereese.

looks like movable type is now using fastCGI - which may help with your problems and follow the path of least resistance at the same time.

Comments

1. Posted by: dieter on January 18, 2007 2:12 PM:

amusing: we're looking at the exact same question in slightly different contexts. I'm a MT Viking, but Drupal looks to be a little beefier, plus we have a bit more of a PHP brain trust than we do Perl.

Will watch this space.

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