Using a premium blogging package: Movable Type

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Introduction

When blogging was developing there were a lot of competing blogging packages, some free, such as WordPress, and some premium packages, Movable Type, MT, becoming the market leader.

MT was particularly liked by those established in the print media. Individual journalists, magazines and newspapers used MT as their online presence. In those days MT was a superior product to the competing, free, open source, blogging software programs.

Being commercial it had a very good support service, it was very straightforward for a professional web designer to develop a customised theme and one of MT’s greatest strengths was that its platform allowed editors to control teams of writers.

MT can also be used to develop a static website or a static website, but with a blog attached. In the second case the layout of the static section and the blog section would be the same.

Blogging today

Today for the average blogger the free package WordPress has virtually all the benefits of MT with the exception of paid support. However, it is very easy to find a freelancer to develop and support your blogging website. WordPress also has the advantage in terms of variety of themes, plug-ins and a massive free support community.

There is a free version of MT, which will allow you to experiment with the package. But it will have quite a few limitations and you will find that you will need to upgrade to a paid version.

A good reason to use MT

I recommend comparing MT with WordPress if you are thinking of developing a high volume blog or online magazine, where you will have quite a few writers, or journalists, producing a large number of articles.

Another area that should consider MT are departments in large corporations where again a group of people are producing online content and there needs to be some control or editing.

For these business activities quick access to the premium support line will be essential. I have also found that senior corporate decision-makers often prefer a complete package, such as MT’s, rather than building up a support and development network from a more, scattered and diverse WordPress community.

Recommendation

Unless you are going to develop a large-scale online project, with a number of people involved, and are prepared to pay for support, then I recommend that you do not use MT.

A second reason for using MT is where you want to develop a static website, with a lot of information pages, but also want to include a blog with exactly the same styling as the rest of the site. (There are ways of doing this with WordPress as well).

For most bloggers WordPress is the best solution.