I never mess with the MT blog software I use because quite frankly I don't need to, it's simple, it's stable, and it just gets the job done. I had been running MT 2.64 for well over a year and I wouldn't even have updated it if it weren't for the fact that I wanted to do some research on the latest features from MT to compare with Roller.

Here's some quick notes from the upgrade and first impressions ...

1. The MT upgrade process is very slick and nicely automated, something I think we should definitely aim for a bit more in Roller. The most notable benefit being the automation of the entire database upgrade process, schema updates and all. It would be very nice to see Roller offer a way to simply drop new .war files into a container and handle all the db upgrade (the most significant part of any upgrade) stuff via a tidy GUI.

2. The MT interface is still a bit more polished than Roller, but that's to be expected considering that Roller is an open source project and doesn't get the same level of commitment. However, despite the MT interface looking "prettier" I would say that for the most part the features and usability are fairly comparable. With a modest amount of additional work I think that Roller can be equal or better than MT as far as features and usability are concerned.

3. MT offers a wider assortment of tools for system admins for getting insight into what's happening across all the blogs controlled by the installation. This is definitely one of Roller's shortcomings in my mind, but it makes sense because we just don't have as big a need to invest in that part of the software considering that it's not nearly as visible to most users. We have bigger things to work on, for now.

4. MT still does not set the published date to the date the entry is actually published, which has always surprised me. Instead they populate that field at the time that entry editing first starts and so if you take 20 minutes to publish an entry like this one then you have the wrong pubtime, and certainly if you draft entries and finish them on different days you have an entirely wrong date. This is one of the small things that bugs me for some reason.

5. The entry posting interface is very similar to Roller (I suppose there is only so many ways to do a blog posting interface) and works well, but all in all I think that WordPress has the best posting interface I've seen. I think that WordPress' interface may be a bit cluttered but they have all the right pieces for publishing available on one page, which Roller is currently missing because you can't A) upload a file at publishing time and B) add new categories at publishing time. Those are 2 important things we really need to fix in Roller.

I'm sure I could go on with a handful more, but I'll leave it at that for now. At the end of the day I am happy to say that Roller has what I believe is a very comparable interface to MT, which is good news because MT is the most used blog publishing software on the web (i think).