Movable Type observations

I've been playing around a bit with Movable Type. A few observations:

Movable Type (MT) is just pretty to look at. Mena G. Trott did the design, and it's very nice.

It's a bit of a pain to install. The first time took me a couple of hours, most of which was spent trying to get the proper Perl libraries in the right places. The second time I installed it on an Earthlink webhosting account, and surprisingly, that went smoothly.

MT's template language appears to be quite flexible: people are using MT as a content management system to generate some sophisticated looking sites.  (See Boxes and Arrows, for example). The ability to assign an item to several categories is quite nice.

I'm sure Radio can do anything that MT can, but in Radio these facilities are a little more opaque; the reply to "Can you do this in Radio" is often "That's a Simple Matter Of Programming."  (That's actually one of the reasons why Radio is so interesting.) MT can do it, but given that MT is another application built in Perl, I sure don't have any interest in hacking on it.

Another nice touch: MT breaks the formatting of templates off into CSS.  The default templates rely exclusively on CSS to generate a multi-column design. There's nothing to stop you from doing this with Radio, but MT is ahead of Radio here.

MT makes it particularly easy to generate multiple pages when you publish. MT presents a number of default templates that get published in addition to an HTML page: RDF, RSS, and you can trivially create other types of pages.  

Finally, MT supports mutiple authors and multiple blogs.  In fact, that's the feature that drew to me check it out.

I can't say anything about the stability of the system; I just haven't used it enough.  I am a little concerned at the number of posts in one MT support forum after the most recent upgrade; I saw dozens of complaints, small and large.  Maybe MT users are just more vocal than other folks.

I'm certainly not giving up on Radio, but Movable Type is worth a close look.