When I began blogging in 2004, Movable Type (MT) was the only real option if one wanted to download software and build a blog/site (MT became company Six Apart and MT is what their hosted blogging service I’m using, Typepad, leverages). The success and momentum of MT and the cheap and great features of Typepad turned my head and the latter was my choice.

At that time, my analysis showed that WordPress wasn’t quite ready for prime-time and I wasn’t willing to bet my blogging future on it. I’ve gotta tell ya though, things have changed!

WordPress has their own free blog hosting service, downloadable software to install on your own server(s), hundreds of templates, and something that surprised and delighted me: incredibly clean and easy to understand code.

I need to say right up front that I am not a coder or developer (I’m a “suit”, a sales/marketing/alliances exec-type) but am a halfway decent “mechanic” and can goof around with PHP and CSS to fix and tweak stuff all day long until I get to the end-state desired. Of course, it doesn’t take long for me to scream out in pain and beg for help, but I’m getting better at this coding stuff and the accessibility of WordPress code lessens my painful struggles.

In the past couple of years I’ve been involved in installing, developing and deploying a wide range of open source solutions like Drupal, Joomla, phpBB, ZenCart and several more. I’ve personally experienced many disparate approaches and conceptual paradigms; various administration interfaces; install procedures both easy and made just for geeks; and the strength or weaknesses of the ecosystems that have popped up around these various packages.

Here’s the primary reason I’m now a WordPress fanboy: I’m involved in a brand new blog/site launching Q1 and have realized during my mucking around in the guts of WordPress (and the theme  I bought) that from WordPress itself to the ecosystem surrounding it, this is the easiest to use and most robust open source platform out there and the ecosystem is delivering an amazing amount of innovation around it.

If you require a commercial platform with all the requisite support options demanded by today’s enterprises, then I’d choose one of the Movable Type Publishing Platform options. If you’re considering a personal or small business blogging platform, WordPress is it. You can even consider building your own blogging network with WordPress Multi-User (MU). Any way you look at it, WordPress is one amazing (and free) chunk of value that I’m pleased to gush about like any good fanboy should.