Why I’ve Chosen WordPress

My previous blog post about [blogging software marketshare](https://priyadi.net/archives/2004/10/13/marketshare-software-blogging-di-indonesia/) spurred many comments from veteran bloggers. As I stated before, long time bloggers prefer [MovableType](http://www.movabletype.org) to other blogging software.

[Thomas](http://warnadunia.net/) has told the world [why he still uses MovableType](http://warnadunia.net/archives/2004/10/why_still_mt). [Avianto](http://home.avianto.com) also posted the entry titled [Why MovableType?](http://home.avianto.com/archives/2004/10/why_movable_type.html). And what are my reasons switching to [WordPress](http://www.wordpress.org)?

**First**, it is an [Opensource](http://www.opensource.org) software. As with almost every other software I use, I prefer Opensource software to proprietary ones, as long as it delivers all the functionality I need. That’s why I’ve chosen to use [Linux](http://www.kernel.org) and [OpenOffice](http://www.openoffice.org). It is the same reason why I’ve chosen WordPress. There are other Opensource blogging software, but I found out that WordPress is probably the most featureful Opensource blogging-ware. It also has an active and always helpful community.

**Second**, I despise static pages. Change the layout? You need to rebuild the whole thing again. It’s also a waste on disk space since the data is duplicated, one in MySQL database, and one in the generated static HTML pages. I’m sure veteran MT users have several solutions to this problem. But the point is I don’t want to spend a lot of my time tweaking blogging-ware that I use. Recent releases of MT supports dynamic publishing. However they are late in delivering that feature, and the lack of dynamic publishing already influenced my decision process.

**Third**, WordPress is dead simple to use. Installation only costed me about 10 minutes of my time. And its default template also already matches my preference.

**Fourth**, I think my old blog sucked and I haven’t had time to customize it. So, unlike veteran MT bloggers, I can afford to start over from scratch.

And before I make another adversary, I have to state that I’m very happy with the current state of blogging software. They all use the same syndication format ([RSS](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(protocol) or [ATOM](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(standard)). They all use the same backtracking protocol ([Trackback](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrackBack) and [PingBack](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingback)). And all the major blogging software also generate standard compliant [XHTML](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XHTML) and [CSS](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_Style_Sheets) out of the box. I really think it was blogging activities that promote standard compliance on the web. So whatever blogging software you choose, I can be sure that our blogs will still be interoperable.

6 comments

  1. Absolutely yes.. WordPress is so easy to use and install (less then 5 minute i guess.. :P), simple and still growing. It also have a tons of plugins that we can use for our blog improvement.. I love WordPress..

  2. IMO, it’s not proportional when we compare blogging software just as a tools context because there’s some important parameter must be the same.

    It is wise to compare Movable Type 3 versus pMachine Pro because both have the same license or Movable Type 2.x versus pMachine Free because both are free for personal use. Another balance compare is Blogger versus LiveJournal, for user who don’t have access directly to database.

    Comparing WordPress with Movable Type 3 will bring us in a flame war!

  3. What you explain there … I have exactly with you when I used b2 — the ancestor of WordPress (and switched to WordPress). For a free tool, WordPress has tons of ideas and power. And in WP kitchen, there are nice people handling a great community.

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