How did WordPress win?: Here’s a blog post written by a former Six Apart engineer about how Movable Type lost to WordPress in the battle of the blogging platforms.
It’s long, but informative. He starts off with these three reasons – which are, lets face it, the most obvious – but then moves on to say much more about what happened.
Movable Type’s licensing fiasco in 2004 angered the community and drove users to WordPress […] Movable Type is not open source. WordPress is. […] Movable Type is written in Perl, while WordPress is written in PHP.
Gadgetopia still runs on Movable Type, believe it or not. There’s just not a compelling reason to change right now – MT does the job I’ve asked it to. (Thought, to be honest, all MT is doing is generating files that define PHP object instances – all the templating is done in PHP.)
Adam Kalsey pointed me to Melody the other day. For all my experience with MT, I didn’t even know this existed.
What I find interesting is that MT/Melody is still a decoupled CMS platform – probably the cheapest, most current one you’ll find. Most all CMS these days are coupled, but MT/Melody is still doing flat file generation, which is really handy in a lot of cases. There are still many, many environments where this is the only option that will work.