I'm all anxious about Movable Type's upcoming 3.0 release. Now is a pretty good time, schedule-wise, for me to start rebuilding my personal website, and I'd love to ditch this cruddy blog software I wrote in the same afternoon I taught myself PHP (which I'm not all that interested in fixing). I'd gladly get on the MT bandwagon, though my first experiments were stymied by the amount of un-redistributable hackery I'd have to employ to build the extensions I want to build. (It's easy to change MT code and templates, not so easy to distribute those changes due to the MT license.) Early announcements for MT 3.0 indicate it will have just the plug-in API enhancements I've been wanting, and now I just wonder if it'll be out soon enough. Naturally, I considered building new software from the ground up with all the fancy engineering skills I picked up since I first built this site, but with far less time and interest than I had back then, it doesn't seem likely reinvention would get me the results I'm interested in.

At some point last year, while hacking on an existing (I didn't write it) medium-sized PHP application with a medium-sized codebase, I decided to swear off PHP. Not because it was a bad language, mind you: especially with v4 and beyond, PHP has all the nice features of other languages used for web applications. But that's exactly why I decided I didn't need it. When a web application gets anywhere close to medium-sized, the display logic needs to be separated from the rest of the code, and it's often best to do this with an isolated templating system (as opposed to, say, other PHP scripts). By that point, a PHP application pretty much resembles its Perl or Python equivalent, and continues to do so for the rest of its development lifetime. Since I use Perl much more often for other non-web-app purposes, if it really were all the same, I might as well stick to the one language.

Beyond Perl > PHP, PHP > Perl, PHP = Perl, and right-tool-for-the-job, I notice that of the dozens of other blog software packages out there, most are written in PHP. I'd considered the possibility that PHP makes for easier distribution and installation of web application software, but it seems regardless of language, every such app has to worry about file permissions, database table creation, and library dependencies (PHP perhaps less so, but only slightly). Perhaps people write their tiny apps in PHP and by the time they get to medium-large apps, it's simply a matter of personal preference what language they use. Since my main interest in something other than Movable Type is the ability to redistribute my extensions without licensing or patchfile difficulties, I'm wondering if there are Open Source PHP-based blog implementations worth extending.

I haven't actually looked at any of these yet, but: Textpattern, pLog, Pivot, WordPress, bBlog.

And so I don't forget to play with it more, just in case: Blosxom.