In light of the recent hari-kari being performed by Six Apart with regard to MT’s new pricing, I’d like to recommend Textpattern to those who now find themselves in need of an alternative.

Don’t get me wrong – MT is great, but the new pricing plan is ludicrous for personal users.
So, here’s what you need to know:

*If you’re a current Moveable Type user, the license is largely what you have now.

*It’s easy – I’ve setup 2 production sites using TXP (one public, one private), and both have been smooth and simple to enact and use, even with no documentation whatsoever – the install instructions are about 10 lines long, so none of this needed.

*Textile is fully integrated, so there isn’t a transition required during which you need html skills. You’ll need those to work up your site so it’s purty though.

*It requires a MySQL database, and a web host that supports php – most have both, even the super-cheapies.

*I’ve noticed that some folks are nervous about the seeming lack of multiple blogs – that’s true in a sense, but most of what these people (an I) would do with multiple blogs is use them for “Sections” or sidebar blogs. Those are fully supported and supremely easy to create, contrary to what you have to do to get what you see on this site, i.e., lots of little groups of commentary and categories – it’s all built in.

*MT has huge support by developers and hackers who provide free tools – ah, but look around a bit. The best plugins are all by a few folks, and they ain’t always easy to get installed. MT-Plugins.org doesn’t work with the newest version of MT as of this writing so you still have to hack to get anything extra installed. TXP has most of the plug-ins covered by default. Those that it doesn’t are already available here.

Take a look. Try it out. It’s free, and don’t let all the “gamma” talk fool you – it’s ready for prime time and Dean Allen is speedy with the updates. Bugs so far have been getting fixed within days, sometimes same day.

Update: Six Apart has clarified their terms after a barrage of complaints, some valid, some not so much. In short, the terms are no long ludicrous. I’m still migrating, however, because MT is a little unwieldy at a certain size, and I’ve been loving the simplicity of TXP. I will also be looking at WordPress as an option.