Today, ***Six Apart|http://www.sixapart.com/*** has announced a new pricing and licensing scheme for MovableType. You can read the pricing information page ***here|http://secure.sixapart.com/***. Basically, what it boils down to is that if your MovableType installation has more than a one user and/or more than three blogs, you’ll need to pay to use it.
SixApart provides this ***interactive selector|http://secure.sixapart.com/licensehelp.html*** to help you figure out what your pricing scenario would be, based on your usage of MovableType. Currently, prwdot.org has four active blog users and three active blogs. According to the selector page, I would need to purchase Movable Type 3.0 Personal Edition Volume License I, for US$119.95 in order to cover our usage.
In the words of The Simpsons’ Moe Szyslak, ‘B-whaaaaaaaa??’
What does the paid version get you?
* Download for Movable Type 3.0 Developer Edition and Movable Type 2.661
* Professional support fron Six Apart
* Ability to promote your site on the Movable Type “Recently Updated” list
* Generous limits on weblogs and authors
* Application updates and fixes (not including major upgrades)
* A guaranteed path to future versions
* Access to fee-based services such as installation, advanced support, other services
The only thing I see of real “value” here is the professional support, which I’ve never needed in the past. Do they plan on making the product more difficult to use? In any case, I can see their plan having some success with people who are actually generating revenue from their MovableType installations, or who are taking donations to run their site… but what of the droves of people, like me, who run a moderate-sized installation with no additional funding source other than their own paychecks.
It reeks.
As many former MovableType users have, I’m already checking out ***WordPress|http://www.wordpress.org/***. I know ***Mike|http://www.refugeisland.net/*** loves it, as do others. So it’s certainly a worthy candidate. I’m also open to any other suggestions.
I really like WordPress, and use it now. But I’m also playing around with Textpattern, and it has great potential.
http://drupal.org ?
Has anyone tried it? Open-source looks like the way to go now? 🙂
Drupal looks a bit overblown for my needs. It’s more like the Slash publishing system. Something more along the lines of WordPress or Textpattern is what I’m looking for.
I have test installs of both WP and TP up, and am playing around with them now.
Yeah, my friend Nikki mentioned this development to me. Needless to say, I’m very glad I switched early this year.
Just so you know, WordPress 1.2-final is going to be released around the middle of next week, according to the Devblog.
So far, I’m not too fond of WordPress’s GUI. MovableType’s GUI is far more evolved and user friendly, IMHO. While I think WordPress may have a lot of good things going on under the hood, I’m not sure that I and my other three users would want to use it at this point.
Also, the dynamically-generated nature of WordPress pages is a problem for me. My site architecture is currently built around a php script that pulls in static files to generate page content. To effectively switch to WP, I would need to redesign the rest of my site’s internals, or else have WP manage all of my site’s content, which I really don’t think is necessary.
If there was some way for WP to generate static html like MT does, I would be a little more likely to use it.
For now I’m going to stick to my current version of MT, and see how this whole situation pans out.
Yeah, I wasn’t all that impressed with the GUI when I first used it, but I got used to it after a little while. What I got — easier installation, no file-rebuilding, and only one template (plus a stylesheet — more than made up for it. 🙂
I’ll admit, it would be nice to not have to rebuild files. It was never a huge deal for me, though. I set the EntriesPerRebuild mt.cfg value to 500, so that it ripped through my whole blog pretty quickly when rebuilding.
I’ve got thoughts brewing, though, of how I might be able to bend WordPress to my will. 🙂
Pingback: I've Gone to America
Pingback: G'Day Mate - Reviews!