wp vs. drupal vs. dokuwiki vs. mt
Recently I have tried Wordpress, Drupal, Dokuwiki and Movable Type.
Wordpress is easy to use, but not easy to customize. It's really frustrating to custom wordpress's theme. And it's not convinent to install some plugins. Some function and configuration lack documentation.
Drupal is very coherent. Its default installation already provides almost every thing I need. (Wordpress need a ton of plugins to get my things done.) Usually you don't need to modify templates using php code to install plugins. Also, it's well documented. What's more, its documentation, themes and plugins are centralized. Usually, you don't need to leave drupal.org to get your things done. However, Drupal requires a lot. It requires lock table privilege. Hey, there a lot of ways to deal with conflicts, but Drupal just chose this way. Quite a few of cheap and free host doesn't allow this. Again, if you want clean urls, you need mod_rewrite and .htaccess. More cheap and free host don't allow this. Wordpress and Dokuwiki both provide a choice of use PATH_INFO instead of mod_rewrite and .htaccess. But this is unavailable in Drupal. Maybe this is because Drupal doesn't care about friendly urls. Even when clean urls enabled, you only get something like http://yourhost/drupal/node/3445. Node/3445 is not very friendly. Yes, there is a plugin called autopath to deal with this. With autopath and clean urls, you can get something like http://yourhost/drupal/node/posttitle. However, why plugin? This should be provided as default. What's worse, this plugin will be deprecated in the future release. Someday you may never find autopath plugin for the latest version.
Dokuwiki is less popular than Wordpress and Drupal, but it's quite nice. It use flat files, which means it doesn't require MySQL. And it can work well with PHP safe mode on. There are a lot of plugins available. You may call it MoinMoin in PHP. It is even better than MoinMoin in some aspects, regardless that it's not as mature and popular as MoinMoin.
Movable Type is not open source. I tried Movable Type 4 beta, which is free for personal use. Its biggest feature is you have the choice of publishing to static files. There are few plugins available for Movable Type 4 beta now. However, the company developed Movable Type say the stable release Movable Type 4 will be published under GPL in the future. I bet plugins for Movable Type will boost when it goes to open source. Besides, currently, Movable Type 4 beta RC1 is on an actually unstable stage, some functions won't work. I can say that the alpha version of Emacs is much more usable than Movable Type's RC version.
My answer is:
Movable Type if you want static files;
Dokuwiki if you want a wiki, and/or cannot and/or doesn't want to use MySQL;
Drupal if you need a powerful CMS, and/or want forums, blogs, and webpages in one CMS, plus you have a good host;
Wordpress if you just want a blog a lot of people prefer. ![]()
I prefer Movable Type since I am old-fashioned.
Static files make me comfort. See my blog:
http://weakish.int.eu.org/blog/
Plus, Wordpress and Drupal are both popular, but IMO Wordpress doesn't deserve its popularity. And, for Dokuwiki, it's less popular, but really worth a try.
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