Five Reasons Why Movable Type is Broken
Here are five reason why blogging software Movable Type is broken:
- Its anti-spam support is dreadful. Yes, there are better anti-spam features in the current version than in prior version. That, however, is like saying the prior version leaked like a sieve, while the current version only leaks like hundred-year-old house. I mean, c’mon: Why is there no easy to way to learn from incoming spam and incorporate it into new anti-spam rules? Yeesh.
- Three words: No visual editor. This is 2005, folks. I had a visual editor in GrokSoup back in 1999. Unbelievable omission, and truly newbie alienating.
- No built-in support for comment-based RSS feeds. The second most important part of blogs is the conversations that build up around posts, and yet there is no easy out-of-the-box way to straightforwardly allow people to subscribe to new comments. Deep down inside, Movable Type just doesn’t care.
- It’s too hard to add in advertising/merchandising support. SixApart should have made it drop-dead easy for people to add in Google Adsense or equivalent, plus whatever else they want to do. Instead you have to code it in by hand. That’s like the owner of some supposedly turnkey commercial real estate telling you that the property isn’t plumbed or wired, but you should feel free to do it yourself.
- One word: Typepad.
So, why hasn’t someone else arrived to take this market away? Commercial blogging and personal blogging are still wide open, with a still small installed base, and no rational person having deep allegiance to Movable Type. It’s time.
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