The Product is More than Just Software

I‘m moving my blog back to WordPress. I originally moved to Mephisto because I was impressed by its quality and ease of use. It has a good design, was well thought-out, and sat on the Rails stack, meaning it was easily extensible. WordPress, by contrast, is implemented as a gigantic for loop, relying on “hooks” to support extension, and basically forcing users into implementing their work as bizarre mashes of code and layout, without the nice MVC separation that Rails provides.

So why am I back to WordPress? Simple: Mephisto is dead. There hasn’t been any active development on the project since the end of 2006, and while that may not seem like a long span of time to its developers, six months of dead air on a beta-quality project is unacceptable. With its market share, WordPress will always have the active support of a vibrant community and development team.

I understand that Mephisto’s developers have been working on something pretty cool, and that there’s probably more money in it than in a blogging platform, so I can’t blame them. The important lesson here, though, is that the end-result of software is more than the software itself. I need to remember that myself as I work on Titan… (beta 2 with a real-live manual is coming soon, I swear!)

Edit: By the way, articles were imported, but it nuked all of the comments. I’m way too lazy to try to recover them. Sorry to anyone who spoke wisdom therein.