I was sitting here drinking my mocha and decided to spend a couple hours searching for quality styles for movable type and then for other platforms. I discovered that there just isn't any resource for quality style downloads like there is for Joomla or even WordPress. So my question to everyone, "Why after all these years of Movable Type, has there been no Style sites and even quality level design for users to download? What is it that they are so non-existent?
I was going to create pro styles for MT but I am starting to think maybe the market is just not there for MT. You have to think about that for a moment when you see Wordpress everywhere but it's like, what happened to marketing efforts to get MT out there? I personally like MT a lot more than WP, and I've been trying to think why isn't it more prominent....
Anyway, its just an observation that happens to be a reality that there just is no Style providers around and curious to know why...This is an interesting question to see what kind of responses I get because in a way this is a bit of info gathering to see if I will proceed with Style development for the end user. I do it for Joomla (which is the environment I come from) and recently added WP but starting to have second thoughts on MT....is there a need for quality Styles or is MT still just for the corporations and companies who create their own?
So... give me your opinions and input on the issue of Styles (where are they and is there a strong enough user market for a top quality resource)
Well, not to brag or wag my finger for not searching Google, but my blog which has about 20-30 WordPress themes converted to MT styles, is the second search result on Google for "Movable Type Styles" ;)
I seen your site there when I was doing google search but as great as that is converting some of the themes of wordpress (many there I am familiar with) wasn't quite what I was referring to...rather more of custom themes not converted from another competing source.
Thanks though...
I seen your site there when I was doing google search but as great as that is converting some of the themes of wordpress (many there I am familiar with) wasn't quite what I was referring to...rather more of custom themes not converted from another competing source.
Thanks though...
The Movable Type user base is much smaller now than it used to be, so you're not going to see nearly as much active third party development as there used to be. WordPress' advantage is that its user base is probably at least one order of magnitude larger than Movable Type's.
Corporate clients--which make up the majority of MT's user-base at this point, I believe--are not interested in a publicly available style. They want custom work. Honestly, I think that's the end of the story.
Agreed Dan, you pretty much pegged it. The majority of the people that use WordPress and Joomla are not corporate clients. MT is easy to theme anyways (as is any similar platform really) so why bother with a style?
@Mike: If you want MT to live, you'll just *have* to capture some market share. Sitting back while WP and friends try to catch up really isn't going to outlast them, but to allow them greater and greater market shares, thus mind shares, and at the end of the day, nobody wants to invest into a specialized platform anymore when people expect this kind of stuff to be available as a commodity. Ever tried to hire Perl programmers? PHP programmers? I think you get the idea.
It's not that MT is sitting back, it's that the MT community is smaller and doesn't have as many people who are contributing to it as WordPress. There are several major template sets that are community maintained like Sandbox which has a number of styles for it.
And with regard to Perl vs PHP, if someone is reasonably competent as a developer, it's not unreasonable to expect them to pick up either language. Basic Perl is not any harder than any other language to pick up, and is sufficient for writing extensions to Movable Type.
This is a very sad situation. I've spent the last half hour trying to find MovableType theme repositories. All the old resources are gone.
Whoever ran the old Style Archive http://www.thestylearchive.com/ let the domain expire. There are a ton of MT reference sites that now link to nothing but a domain squatter's AdSense links page.
Arvind Satyanarayan didn't even bother to redirect links to his old Movable Type Style Generator http://styles.movalog.com/generator/
Basically all of the old tools have been abandoned...rather abruptly...and there's nothing else out there.
I think if MT wants to keep to the corporate world, I don't see it lasting long unless this is the market they want only. I really feel MT should also focus on the individual blogging market (in addition to the corporates) because MT kicks WP in usability and function but honestly, search google and you the majority of outdated results and there is nothing but tumble weeds.
I've sent Anil Dash an email and he replied back that once hes off his vacation, he and I will follow up with a nice discussion about all this...its obvious that I got his attention.
Quote from Mike T: "It's not that MT is sitting back, it's that the MT community is smaller and doesn't have as many people who are contributing to it as WordPress." Well...you have to ask the question, why is that? Then you have to take that question and the answer(s) and then come up with a solution.
Here is something to check out: go to compete.com and enter in movabletype.com and wordpress.org and look at the stats.
SixApart burned a lot of bridges when it announced the 3.x licensing changes. That is when a lot of the MT contributors left. A lot of people haven't forgiven 6A for having the audacity to want to make some money off of its product's use outside of the corporate world.
Things will get interesting in the next couple of years because WordPress is not aging gracefully. The publishing model that it uses is inherently resource intensive, and as WordPress grows in complexity, it'll only become more of a resource hog. As that happens, more hosts are going to have to think carefully about how they allow their users to use WordPress.
Join to me,, I'm doing a web site only with styles for movabletype ,, I like MT and I goint to promote it
Hello spam commenter PerlHispano. I like your entirely advertisement comprised website. I also like that your spam comment is still here after a year. Yay Movable Type.