Since the release of Movable type 5 a lot of people have observed their new admin interface bears an uncanny resemblance to WordPress. Despite that I’ve been a fan of MT for a long time; I must admit it does look an awful lot like Wp. There are a few screen shots at BloggingPro if you want to see for yourself.
Six Apart says the redesign is largely due to feedback from their users. Personally, I preferred the admin interface from MT 4.x over this new interface. My complaints about their platform had more to do with functionality than aesthetics. In fairness Six Apart has resolved some of those complaints. Unfortunately other annoyances have not yet been addressed. Custom fields in MT drive me crazy. The default behavior for a custom image field is to insert a text link to the image and not insert the image directly. Who thought that was logical?
There are by contrast some things I really like about MT compared to WP. When uploading new media, MT allows you to choose the directory for that media. A date based sub-directory is automatically suggested in a pull down, but you can specify your own directory name. That’s really useful when creating galleries. If I’m uploading photos from a family birthday party, I can upload the photos to a directory called ‘mom_bday_2010′. WP’s choice of behaviors are to either to sort uploads into directories by date or dump them all into the root of the ‘uploads’ directory.
In the end WP wins for both usability and customization. The plug-in and theme architecture makes WP endlessly adaptable. Thought MT has recently introduced a ‘themes’ function to apply new styles to your site with a single click, I have yet to see a single theme. For MT, looking like WordPress won’t win over developers who’ve created complete client solutions based on WordPress. Nor will users who rely on WP’s plugins and themes be satisfied with MT’s limited choice of styles and plug-ins.
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