Question

Just deciding which to use. Movable Type or WordPress.
MT has one important strength: static publishing. Since wp has WP Super Cache, is there any reason to use Movable Type?

Answer 1

You’re not telling enough about your needs to tell which one might fit them better. However the MT publishing model and WP super cache are not really comparable. The former offers you out of the box a variety of publishing models (static, dynamic, batch queue) AND various cache mechanisms which you can mix depending on the content, while WP Super Cache is a plugin that is here to alleviate the performance problems inherent to the always-dynamic nature of WP.

Let say you’re serving HTML pages, say with bits of PHP in them to make the comparison even closer (publishing static HTML isn’t WP’s strength at all), here how the two systems compare:

Movable Type in static publishing mode:
– add/change content -> MT will publish only those files that need to be rebuilt, on the filesystem. The database is solicited only at this point AND only for the templates that were not already pre-calculated and cached.
– visitor requests a resource (HTML, XML, PHP, whatever) -> web server fetches the file (possibly interpreting it through PHP, server-side includes etc.) and serves it. MT and the database do not get in the way here.

WP + Super Cache:
– add/change content -> WP updates the database
– visitor requests a page (a PHP script) -> web server launches WP through PHP, WP pulls content either out of the database (then cache it) or out of the cache (which requires additional CPU and memory), sends it back to the web server which sends it back to the client. Way more layers and resources involved here at every request.

The key strengths of MT WRT to WP are that:

• MT will let you chose, template by template, whether a page needs to be published 1) statically (either immediately after a change or placed in a publish queue) or dynamically (pulling the content out of the database at every request).
• MT offers a wide variety of cache settings for each template out of the box, not requiring any plugin to optimize your site.
• MT can publish anything, it just doesn’t impose any format in terms of output. E.g. you can manage and publish HTML, CSS, JS, PHP pages statically in the same site, the CMS content is pulled from the database only at publishing time, and they can contain scripts or server-side includes handled by the web server.
• MT is a real content management system decoupled from the web server (serving web pages is the job of your web server and a good web server knows how to serve pages efficiently without extra layers of caches or CMS/database dependancies).
• MT templates are built using a markup language, MTML, easy to learn and similar to HTML (makes them much easier for designers and people not comfortable with learning how to code in PHP).
• The absence of code and direct hooks to the database in templates also makes it way more secure than WP (I haven’t heard of one malicious MT plugin in 10 years).
• Lastly, MT is very predictable in terms of server resources, and can handle a great deal of traffic (even on a cheap plan) when publishing static resources or even PHP pages. I have yet to see a scenario where WP would be more efficient than MT in terms of operating costs.

If I may rephrase the question (it can also help answer yours), is there any reason to use WP? (There are, but I don’t know your actual needs 😉