DUI is a design blog filled with articles and information. Despite the name, this is not your local AA.

MT and Wordpress Won’t Play Nice commentary

Comments Left This post contains one response. Skip to them now.

MT WPWhy is my Wordpress Dashboard currently flooded with Movable Type headlines? Because they refuse to be friends. At our expense, we have to witness the constant bickering between Wordpress and its fanboys and MT and theirs. Sure you can change the feed url, but for most of us, these are the kind of things we have to see.

My main question is, why can’t both sides just take a cue from their love with social networks and commenting / daily internet speech and follow the acronym of STFU. For two professional companies to do so much bitching in the public eye is really beyond me. Let’s argue about who has better features, which side is “changing the internet”, how much we can harass the other side, and how many fans we have to support our cause.

Enough is Enough

Both Wordpress and Sixapart have their own pages on Facebook, where you can become a fan and show off your pride to your favorite blogging system. But wait a minute, that’s all it is - a blogging system! If I want to be a fan, I’ll use the system, maybe write some articles on how to use it, recommend it to clients, and etc. I’m not going to embrace it like we’re married or something like that. I’m not going to enlist for the Wordpress or Movable Type army and join in with the other (idiots) who try to defend one side and the other.

Both Wordpress and Sixapart are ego hungry companies. Rather than arguing who is better, why not focus on making new features and improving current ones. While you’re at it, forget about making comparisons, because neither side knows how to do it right.

Copyright Information © Copyright 2008 DUI. / Subscribe to the rss feed.

One response left to “MT and Wordpress Won’t Play Nice”

  1. By Anil. (permalink)

    Published on August 21st, 2008 at 3:56 pm.

    AJ, your point is well taken. To be honest, at Six Apart the goals we articulate both inside and outside the company are about helping *all* bloggers. Blogs.com? We just launched it, and it helps promote all bloggers, regardless of platform. TypePad AntiSpam? It’s free, open source, and works with *any* platform. Blog It for your iPhone or Facebook? Totally free, and works with any platform. Six Apart Media provides ads for bloggers on any platform.

    In short, we’re putting not just our words, but our actions, behind supporting all bloggers. And then, to be honest, we’re proud of our work and put out a video promoting the new version of Movable Type Pro, which has all kinds of cool features and is cool for bloggers. And we didn’t say *a single thing* about any other platforms or companies, just outlined what we think is a pretty exciting vision for where blogging is going. Automattic responded by making a parody, which frankly was surprising in its childishness, so we responded.

    I’d be happy to never write a blog post about Automattic or WordPress again, except about the ways that Six Apart is trying to help the WordPress community, and bloggers at large with tech like OpenID or OAuth or the like. But to be honest, I don’t think Lloyd Budd or other Automattic staff will leave it alone.

    And that’s the crux of the problem: Neither Movable Type nor TypePad store user passwords in plain text, and they never have. Is that the impression you got from all those posts spamming your WP dashboard? I didn’t think so. So, given that someone’s deliberately misleading people about the security best practices of our platforms, how would you recommend we respond?

    That’s a serious question — what’s the best way to respond to this? Because for years, our policy at Six Apart was to just ignore all the misinformation, but that makes people think it’s true. And frankly, that’s unacceptable to me. Now, we do try to spare people who don’t care from having to hear about this stuff — Six Apart products include product/platform news in them, but they don’t have stupid posts from people’s personal blogs or links to their personal sites built in. Beyond not promoting the conversation, what’s the right way to respond to people deliberately spreading incorrect information about our work?

    And again — I apologize for being part of the problem in general, and appreciate you taking the time to point out how annoying it is. :)

Leave a response






Explore:

  • Home

    Home plate, basecamp, the root, whatever.

  • About

    A little bit about DUI and what it is.

  • Content

    The DUI content archives. Good stuff here.

  • Freebies

    Free items you can grab without going to jail.

  • Subscribe via RSS Subscribe

    Join the other subscribers now.

  • Feedback

    Get in touch with the man behind DUI.

Sections:

Blogroll