Richard Stellingwerf, author of the ClearLooks GTK+ 2.x Theme Engine is using WordPress to power his blog. Here’s what he had to say about the installation:

Well I decided it was time for a proper website. Since it would be mostly a weblog, I decided to try this thing called Wordpress.

As with anything in Gentoo, installation was a breeze. I had it up and running in a matter of minutes, and I haven’t got any wiser doing it. Automatic installations rule

Of course, on Gentoo, you can just emerge wordpress and be done with it.

So WordPress now has a reputation of being “User Friendly”. Cool.

The Tampa Bay news ran a story about the WordPress blogs at USF. My favorite part of the story? The very last line, that reads:

“I was surprised at how easy it was to use.”

Tuomas Kuosmanen, a gnome, gimp and evolution developer, has this to say after he upgraded his blog to v1.5 :

So I upgraded my blog to WordPress 1.5 by following the documentation on their wiki and wow, they changed the default template! And I love it. Now, 1.5 has themes, so I did manage to restore my own old template in 2 minutes as a theme, but then it looked so crappy compared to this - maybe I’ll just keep using this new one because it is so good.. I did a quick hack title picture for now, I those will be fun to alter every now and then…

Very nice, this blog engine has been a joy to use and this makes it even better. Great free software!

Coming from someone whose work I admire, these are encouraging words. To this day, when I happen across a blog and I see it powered by WordPress, I feel happy, and when it’s the blog of someone I admire, I am positively ecstatic!

Now if only tigert would make us WordPress wallpapers and icons, along the lines of his other wallpapers

I am happy to see that Gnome developer Jamin likes WordPress. He has a few kind words to say about WordPress’ usability :

blogging software: WordPress 1.5 is a pleasure to use. I particularly love the settings for dealing with comment spam:
…
The main reason I switched from Movable Type to WordPress was due to the restrictive license changes for MT. So I switched for philosophical reasons. But now I’m enjoying the practical benefits.

I was goofing around with Wordpress last night and in 10 minutes I had it downloaded, installed and all my MT archives imported. It took less time to do that than it does to upgrade Movable Type to the latest version.

From Da Brettman Speaks.

I never looked at it that way before. As an old MT user, though, I have to admit I was overwhelmed at the prospect of changing stuff related to my blog, and it’s a lot easier to bend WordPress to my will. I have to say that the Template Tag system MT uses is supposed to be easier, but I’d pose a question to my readers - did it really take you longer to figure out WordPress’ template tags, than it did to figure out how MT’s tags work?

Also, dabrettman goes on to say…

And it’s not like Wordpress isn’t robust. It’s just not as, uh, consuming, I guess. I just know that installing MT from scratch like I did Wordpress last night requires some work, even if you don’t want to do much with it other than simply use it and not make tinkering with it a serious hobby or profession

Amen! WordPress is far easier for those of us that do not intend to make tweaking our blogs a hobby, or a time-consuming chore, depending on how you look at it.

It takes a lot to get me to redesign my blog, or even activate a new plugin. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Ryan, a web applications developer from Calgary, Alberta, reviews WordPress. The title, “Wordpress, a Programmer’s Review” caught my attention, so I decided to stop by and read it.

He has some nice things to say about WordPress, and the support system, and the usual remark about the documentation not being upto the mark. Ryan, we all hope that given some time (and stability) there will be good developer documentation to pass around. But really, all you need is a WordPress phpXref site and php.net. Of course, you have #wordpress on irc.freenode.net if you have any pressing questions regarding how things work. All said, I still cannot dodge the fact that there are far too few man hours going into the documentation effort, and part of it is my fault (As it is yours, random WordPress user.)

Ton Zijlstra writes us a WordPress plugin to cross-post to a Wiki from a Weblog.

Zijlstra uses MovableType for his main weblog. He has this to say :

Wordpress, even though this is a Moveable Type powered blog? Yes because I have been experimenting with Wordpress, and it turned to be relatively easy to add plugins there. MT seems a bit more complicated, but I will try to do that next.

Hear, hear!

So MovableType’s latest catch-up-with-WordPress edition is coming soon, and I could not resist mentioning that it is only still catching up with WordPress, with regards to features. The idea is interesting, isn’t it? The market leader catching up with the upstart, but in terms of features, WordPress is a step or two ahead of MovableType, when it comes to managing all things related to a single weblog (notice how I nimbly step around the multiple weblog feature MovableType has, that WordPress does not ), and making sure that your content is accessible in several ways, according to the readers’ preferences.

In short, if I had to chose a Manager for the content of my weblog, I would hire WordPress. For one, the manager is slimmer (download file: 310 KB versus 1.29 MB + lower usage of server space), will work for free, and then also takes care to get the message across effectively, with minimal loss-in-transit, which is most important. Conforming to standards and providing the content in different formats and feeds sure helps with all this.

Neil responds to a comment I left, and he says :

Indeed, MT doesn’t have this (RSS feeds for comments to a post) by default, but it’s trivial to add - you just need to create another Individual Entry Archive that displays comments in RSS format.

With WordPress, you don’t have to create another archive (with the associated cost of webspace for storing the archive pages), and your readers can keep track of comments to specific posts, or all the posts on your weblog, by default. There are links for the RSS feed for comments to specific posts, as well as the whole blog, available on the default template. Just one example where WordPress outshines MovableType. I am sure there may be some cases where MovableType upstages WordPress, and i wish to state that I don’t mean to say that WordPress is better than MovableType in all aspects. Some folks might just find MovableType a better tool, with good reason.