During the Nick Berg traffic spike you said you were going to move away from MT. What about the latest version made you want to stay?

(I'm thinking of upgrading myself down the road).

Seki's known to not like WordPress, for a very good reason: it's many times harder to get a decent looking site in WP than it is in MT. (My site still has some minor style glitches that didn't exist when I still ran MT, and I switched 3 months ago). For me the technological and license superiority of WP won out despite the PITA factor (WP's instantaneous posting is a major time saver, and we run multiple blogs on our domain which would be big bucks with MT 3), but if you want "the look" and low hassles MT's clearly still the way to go.

Seki's known to not like WordPress, for a very good reason: it's many times harder to get a decent looking site in WP than it is in MT. (My site still has some minor style glitches that didn't exist when I still ran MT, and I switched 3 months ago). For me the technological and license superiority of WP won out despite the PITA factor (WP's instantaneous posting is a major time saver, and we run multiple blogs on our domain which would be big bucks with MT 3), but if "the look" is important to you MT's clearly still the way to go.

MT 3.11 has dynamic publishing as an option, and as I've looked at WP there's lots of little things that I'm not thrilled about. I may use it for other projects, but not here.

Wouldn't WP, because its strictly dynamic, be a drawback on high-traffic sites? James Joyner's recent down time was the result of a traffic surge that caused too many connections to his database. That wouldn't have happened on a MT blog because its static, right?

Plus, MT's newest release (I believe) offers a mixture of dynamic and static features which should give the best of both worlds.

Can WP, or any other software, compete with that?

Wizbang is a high traffic site, and yes a dynamic only program might be an issue. MT can do static, dynamic, or a cached mix. WP (I think) does all that except straigt static.

There are far too many variables to say that dynamic is/is not better for all high traffic sites. For one thing, the cleanliness of the code can make a HUGE difference.

A purely dynamic site with the most efficient DB usage and a decent server will handle high traffic relatively well -- of course, there's something ot be said for having a Database server that's not on the same box as your webserver, but I digress.

The problem with static-only sites is that rebuilding is very taxing on the server and if the site is rebuilt often, it can become too much. In systems where visitor actions can trigger rebuilds (comments, trackbacks, etc) this is a bigger concern because it's not necessarily a known quantity.

I don't have a "high traffic" site, but I use a mixture of static and dynamic (dynamic homepage, static archives -- but the trackbacks and comments are always static) which, when I was deciding how best to set it up, seemed to have the best average-case.

...but that's just one nerd's two cents.

eta?

I hope your page load time won't increase to as long as Vodkapundit's did after the facelift.

Oh boy......
~C