I wasn’t what you would call an “early adopter” of WordPress. In fact, I sometimes feel like I was one of the last to make the switch from Movable Type, which I loved and recommended to anyone who asked me what a blog was (yes, those were the days). Today, of course, over 90% of the work I do is on WordPress- and I’ve fully embraced this powerful publishing system.
But there are alternatives. And today, I want to show you three of them.
Habari. This, in comparison to WP, is one of the latest blogging systems, and you can tell right off the bat: it feels more modern somehow. Indeed, their FAQ explains just how modern it is:
Habari is being written specifically for modern web hosting environments, and uses modern object-oriented programming techniques. Using these recent but well-established additions to the PHP language allows Habari to make use of PDO, enabling prepared statements for all interactions with the database. This greatly reduces the system’s vulnerability to SQL injection attacks. This is just one of many benefits of modern object-oriented techniques.
LifeType is worth a look especially if you’re tasked to build a blog for a non-techie client to use- its really simple to use, and offers multiple blogs and themes built on Smarty. I haven’t had much experience with LifeType, but its loyal users sing praises about its clean code and lightness.
And finally, Movable Type. Okay, so I’ll always have a soft spot for MT- but you know what? It’s a great system, maybe the only one on this list that can truly go head to head with WordPress in terms of features. It features multiple blogs (something I would love regular WP to have), supports both static and dynamic page generation, and has some of the most beautiful blog themes ever to grace the Internet. Movable Type is powered by Perl and not PHP, so if you’re more comfortable with the former, this is probably a better choice for you.
Do you have any WordPress alternatives to suggest? Let us know.