Six Apart’s newly launched Movable Type Pro seems to be a challenge to WordPress’s current dominance of the blogosphere. Or perhaps Six Apart is looking to gain lost ground?

Not too long ago, Movable Type was synonymous with blogs and blogging. But as blogging became mainstream and not just the realm of hobbyists, competition rose in the form of free blog services like Blogger and the open source WordPress platform.

Movable Type’s foray into the commercial sector drew an outcry. Bloggers took for granted for far too long that something as functional as Movable Type was free. And it’s hard to beat free – little wonder now that WordPress is likely the most popular blog hosting platform for the self-hosting.

WordPress set itself apart early by being both easy to install and a quick download. What I think helped it along to popularity is the ease of customization WordPress offers. Thousands of free templates are available for WordPress and changing the look and feel of a WordPress blog is usually nothing harder than an upload.

Movable Type on the other hand didn’t gain any favours with its intricacies, templating challenges and the confusion bloggers had about licensing. The big question really was and is – can you have ads on the site?

It’s not a trivial question. Expression Engine, another CMS/blogging alternative disallows advertising on non-commercial license. Probably a reason why it’s little known among the masses. There’s money to be made blogging and Six Apart knows it only too well.

Movable Type Pro is aimed squarely at the new breed of ‘pro-bloggers’. An engine that already comes with a bucketload of features, the TypePad Antispam (which is claimed to better than WordPress’s alternative – Akismet) and allows ad placement with no restrictions.

Contrast that with WordPress’s frequently documented security issues, and the need for plenty of plugins to give WordPress more functionality. Adding images to WordPress posts is still not as streamlined as say Expression Engine or Movable Type. Its free bloghosting site, WordPress.com still doesn’t allow for easy ad placement unlike the other free alternative, Blogger.

Six Apart will still have an uphill struggle trying to persuade the masses that the new Movable Type Pro is a better alternative to WordPress. But I think what will make Movable Type Pro sink or swim is word of mouth – or should I say word-of-blog?

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Entry was posted on Thursday, August 21st, 2008 at 3:06 pm under Blogosphere, Software.

Read more entries by Erna Mahyuni.
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