I do not understand why successful technology companies, seeing another different but also successful technology, realize "we can do that too" and immediately assume "and therefore we should".<p>Microsoft sees Google being a search engine and sinks billions upon billions into failing to be one. Google sees Facebook being social and decides it needs to be social (an upcoming disaster). Facebook sees Twitter being real-time and decides it needs a real-time stream too (a bad idea they have since buried under the "most recent" link).<p>In the CMS world, we have Drupal for complicated content-management, Wordpress for full-featured blogs, and Tumblr for drop-dead-simple blogs. There is no reason one of these products should try to fill all three roles, and no practical way to do so (because it is, I posit, impossible to be both as simple as Tumblr and as configurable as Drupal).<p>Wordpress is great. It is the leader in its category. There's no need for it to try jumping into another category that would distract from its core competency.
Tumblr is more than a blogging platform though, it's a <i>community</i>, much like Twitter. Tumblr is more like Twitter than it is Wordpress.<p>For example, from what I've seen this is the "average" tumblr user: <a href="http://soporslime.tumblr.com/" rel="nofollow">http://soporslime.tumblr.com/</a><p>That is not a traditional blog, not at all.
I just moved the SproutRobot blog from Blogger to Tumblr for one reason: People share stuff on Tumblr. No one really shares stuff on blogs.<p>You can add a "tweet this" or "like this" button to your blog posts, but the only way to get Tumblr kids passing your stuff around is to have a tumblr. Moving away from Blogger (or Wordpress) doesn't seem to sacrifice any shareability, which is the singular purpose of blogging.
I've had blogs on LiveJournal, Wordpress, Blogger, Posterous and Tumblr, and here's my view on the difference:<p>Livejournal: The proto-Facebook, for personal blogging and sharing your thoughts/lives with your friends, with a personal connection with the people who follow you.<p>Wordpress.com/Blogger: Mainstream blogging, letting you share your opinion with the world. I switched from Wordpress.com to Blogger because they inject ads into your blogs. Neither have great editing interfaces.<p>Posterous: Mainstream blogging simplified, I switched from Blogger to Posterous because it just works. I can write a post insert images and it will come out looking decent (on Blogger/Wordpress I have to spend far longer tweaking layout, etc.).<p>Tumblr: Single media micro-blogging, Tumblrs support for mixed media blogging is very poor, you have a photo or a block of text, but not both. It's much more about community as well, it's closer to Twitter than to the other blogging platforms. It's all about followers and re-blogging other peoples posts.
I don't think it's Tumblr, but what about Posterous?<p>For websites where the blog is just a part of the site and not the central component, Wordpress is overkill. And maintenance of updates and plugin updates is a pain once you start getting beyond one or two installs.<p>I've been thinking that it's time to reevaluate the blogging options out there rather than defaulting to a big-ass Wordpress install for every client that just wants a simple blog as part of their site.
Has anyone ever looked at the internals of WP? You'll find all of the worst practices known in PHP development (which I find to be a bad practice all it's own). Maybe it's bias, but I can't imagine people who write such poor code being able to compete with a startup that actually uses technology competently (which may or may not be Tumblr).<p>In this case the question is more about whether Tumblr serves a specific need better than WP and not apparently about technical superiority. Still, again, if you can infer anything about the minds behind WP from the code they write then these guys are creating an app that was cutting-edge innovative maybe ten years ago. For God's sake they don't even have a proper separation of logic from presentation.
I feel like I have pretty good insight on this issue.<p>I actually use both. WordPress is my backend for Tumblr. I run a news blog called ShortFormBlog ( <a href="http://shortformblog.tumblr.com/" rel="nofollow">http://shortformblog.tumblr.com/</a> ), which has content that works well on Tumblr but requires a more robust approach in terms of the creation of the content due to the fact that the posts tend to be more graphical in nature. Which is where WordPress comes in.<p>It has a lot of benefits. When breaking news happens, I don't have to cover every piece of the story … I can reblog the missing pieces from other news Tumblrs. And if I want to do more detailed posts, I can switch back to my customized WordPress backend, which has a modified version of TinyMCE and Tumblrize to allow me to do more design-heavy posts. I also get to keep an archive of the stuff that took more time so it's held in a non-centralized place.<p>The overall benefit? At 6,000 followers and counting in just six months, I have a much larger audience than I ever did with the WordPress site. There's much more communication with readers, and since it's centralized as opposed to all over the place, it's easier to latch onto. I also have gotten some media coverage from Mashable and Mediaite, and I've even worked with the Tumblr staff on some things.<p>WordPress has its uses, but Tumblr has major advantages that you can't get with a self-hosted site. The community is there and it's been well-nurtured. That's as good a reason as any to give it your attention.
I have never known a time where Wordpress was not way more bloated than Tumblr is now, and I've been using Wordpress for about 5 years. That being said, the comparison is only valid when comparing them as <i>services</i> - as far as I know, Tumblr is not available as a platform to use on your own server. (That sucks, because the Tumblr service is extremely unreliable.) As services, though, Tumblr is way more fun to write on.
I refer upvoters to my previous comment on this phenomenon:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2178493" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2178493</a><p>The tl;dr version is that fill-in-the-blank linkbait titles are a bit tedious.
>Putting aside the flack Tumblr has gotten for their downtime issues of late,<p>I love how the author just brushes this off like it's not a big deal. I've tried to use tumblr because everyone goes silly for it, but I wasn't able to even set up an account because the site was down. That's fine for something like twitter but if using tumblr as a publishing tool for my business, what am I supposed to do when it's down?<p>Tumblr? No thanks. I'll take a wordpress site on my own servers all day long. If I really want some other platform to simply publish on, posterous is drop dead simple and doesn't go down.<p>But, that's just my .02...
in an ideal codebase, such as might result from vertical-slice features being added iteratively plus thoughtfully designed features, feature groups and permissions, could a mature product like wordpress not present different levels of simplicity? "enable simple blogging only" v "enable full cms"<p>I have first hand experience with this and I think it is not only possible, but a reasonable goal for any well designed product. (the advantage of dynamic feature walls is already a huge win)
As interesting as Tumblr is, I'm extremely wary of switching to it because of the downtime issues they've had:<p><a href="http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/12/17/the-most-reliable-and-unreliable-blogging-services-2/" rel="nofollow">http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/12/17/the-most-reliable-and-un...</a>
I think it is, it's really easy to create a theme or port a static site over to make it dynamic. Half of tumblr's users are teen girls but they are geeks so they make lot's available for us geeks to use it to hack.
If only Tumblr would work well, I would love to switch, and move all my family to Tumblr, too. But somehow the fancy interface never works when I try it.
No.<p>>Remember when WordPress was criticized for being “just a simple blogging platform”?<p>Have WordPress really ever been called that? The admin/settings interface is ridiculous.