Adobe’s take on WordPress vs MovableType

To be fair, this is actually an “Adobe employee’s personal take” (as Anil Dash pointed out) on this situation. My post is not meant as a slam to Movable Type, I simply found humor in the quote on the Adobe blog.

While helping out in the WordPress IRC channel today, someone sent me a link to an Adobe Blog called Penguin.SWF, which tracks development status and issues regarding the Linux version of Adobe’s Flash Player. In case they change it, this image is from the bottom of the right sidebar. The exact text is “Powered by a blogging system that’s not as good as WordPress but still tries really hard” and “tries really hard” links to MovableType.com.

WordPress and Movable Type are competing platforms, but recently that competition has come to a boil. Anil Dash, Six Apart’s Chief Evangelist, took some shots with a blog post titled A WordPress 2.5 Upgrade Guide where he asserted that Movable Type was the upgrade that WordPress installs needed. Matt Mullenweg, WordPress founder, fired back in a Twitter message that said “six apart is getting desperate, and dirty” to which Anil replied “desperation is resorting to name-calling and slander instead of substance — if there’s a factual error, i’m glad to fix it.”

The barrage went on for weeks, spilling into blogs, forums, and ultimately into the community itself. I’m not going to get into my personal take on the situation right now, that’s for another, much longer, post. Suffice it to say that I develop WordPress sites, write WordPress plugins, and contribute code to WordPress. What I find much more interesting is that someone over at Adobe, on the Linux version of Adobe’s Flash Player, is revolting because they don’t like Movable Type.