I have three blogs on this site. One of them is this one, my personal blog, which I set up first just to experiement with this whole blogging phenomenom, but I got hooked and continued to update it nearly daily. And when my friend Maddy got acute lymphatic lymphoma, I set up a blog for her to record her thoughts and feelings as a form of release and catharsis for her. When she got too sick to post, we added a couple of other authors to her blog so that the people who were visiting her in the hospital and talking to her on the phone could keep the rest of her friends updated. And when she died, I set up memorial blog site with an author userid and password that anybody could use to post memories of Maddy, and also to post announcements of things like the memorial service in Philadelphia last winter and the interment ceremony in Quebec this summer.
So while it’s my site, and non-commercial, I have multiple blogs and multiple authors. Well, SixAhead, the people who maintain the MovableType software that this blog runs on have decided that people like me need to be hit up for vast quantities on money. I could probably afford the money they want, but by the same token I don’t want to pay it. So now I’m looking for new blog software. I’ve heard good things about Textpattern and WordPress, but neither of them allows multiple blogs, so I’d have to set up instances. Not sure how that works. Also, one or both of them only supports MySQL, and I much prefer PostgresSQL.
Plus they’re both written in PHP, which I swore I would never touch again after leaving my last job. Seems to have been designed to be incompatible with even minor revisions of itself, and makes insecure coding the easiest option at every step.
Of course, I’m sure there are even more people out there who hate Perl just as much, and perhaps PHP has matured since 4.3, the last version I used.
The only thing stopping me from staying on MT 2.661 for ever is that eventually flaws/exploits will be found, and I have a sneaking suspicion that sixapart will tell people to “upgrade” to 3.0, rather than issue a patch.
I wonder what the license says about us patching the code ourselves in that scenario…
Actually WordPress was at least that nice that I touched PHP and MySQL – two packages I really don’t like at all. But I have to admit, WordPress really is a nicely done package. And it doesn’t suck up resources like other on-the-fly-generating packages I tried. PHP is still icky and MySQL still isn’t a real database …
You don’t have to update you know. 3.0 offers no real features over 2.661 at this stage (it probably will in the future once some plugins are developed), so unless you’re desperately unhappy with 2.661 (or whatever version you’re running) there’s no need to change IMHO.
Looks like sixapart have had a rethink – you should be okay with MT3 after all:
revised pricing/licensing scheme
I had the same thought as you, baz, on reading the MT site, but the 5 authors/5 blogs limit applies to the lowest paid level, at about 70 bucks. The free level is still limited to 1 author, 1 blog.
They’ve also said that no one will be forced to upgrade from 2.6x, which will remain free. Also, MT Blacklist won’t work with 3.0, though Jay Allen is apparently getting ready to work on a version that will.