I have a final draft of JWKC Classic finished in a photoshop file, and am debating whether to begin coding tonight. If I did, I could (possibly) get it done for tomorrow’s meeting. Plus I’m shooting Sadie’s kids tomorrow for the site as well…but unless I do a rotating banner I don’t plan on changing the design.

Last Saturday, Alan and Matt and I stopped at Micro Center (think huge computer parts store, with video games, bags, and books). I picked up a web design magazine, and while flipping through saw Moveable Type listed as a top open source app.
“Moveable Type is not open source!” I said. “What idiots.”
However, I googled it this evening to see if I was wrong. Low and behold, MT does have an open source option, available since last December. It’s an interesting decision, considering it’s too little and way too late for most of us.

For those not on the blog scene when I was a teenager, MT used to be the most popular (and best) blogging program. It was easy to use, not too bad to code, and had one amazing feature – you could install it once, then create multiple blogs from one control center. For me, who almost always has more then one site, this was awesome. Other programs included Expression Engine, good but it cost money (MT was free), b2, and the newish Wordpress.

Then MT did the unthinkable, they put a price tag on their program. But the insulting thing was that even after buying MT you would never be allowed to fully own it. They put a limit on the number of users in their commercial licensing. Expression Engine, their main rival at the time, chargers $100 for a personal license and $250 for a commercial license. MT offered a free version limited to one user, a business version for $396 for five users or $1500 for 20 users.
Not only are the prices astronomical for the market, but they only offered a restricted and use limited product.

The blogging community went through the roof. MT lost most of its users, who (though they still had an older, unfettered version of MT) switched platforms on sheer principle. Expression Engine cashed in on this, and offered the first 1000 upset MT users to email them for a free copy of EE. I was one of them, and still have EE around somewhere on my hard drive. But while some did switch to EE, most moved to Wordpress.

At the time WP was not as streamline or quite as functional as MT, but the WP developers soon stepped up to the plate and created a quality platform that rivals (surpasses) the best. And the great thing about open source is that everyone can adapt, alter, edit, and write plugins to share with everyone else. Because the plugins are written by bloggers for their own sites, you can find pretty much anything you need – someone else has already had that problem and fixed it.

Sorry MT, but you’ll have to do more then that to impress me now.

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Metainfo

I used MT before they started charging. I really liked the fact that you could manage multiple sites with one install but not enough to pay for it. I keep hoping that Wordpress will do something like that. I think they may have but it seems geared towards much larger sites. It’s called Wordpress MU: http://mu.wordpress.org/

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