I’ve just finished installing the Kubrick template for both Drupal and MovableType. The template does a decent job of hiding the complexity inherent in these systems, and looks relatively pretty, too.
In my mind, it’s back to a dead-even horse race. The biggest drawback of Drupal was the complexity – too many widgets on the screen, so novices could get easily confused. It’s immediate benefits are LDAP authentication, and extremely flexible content types and easy publishing. Drawbacks include the mash-everything-into-one-website-with-multiple-views strategy, where it becomes difficult (impossible?) to create truly unique weblogs as part of the larger system. They all feed into the same content store, and are all displayed via the same interface.
Now, the biggest advantage of MovableType isn’t the simplicity for the end-user, but in being able to set up distinct weblogs with their own templates and groups of authors. This would be much more useful for something like a departmental website. Where Drupal squishes everything into essentially a single weblog with multiple views, MovableType creates silos of content, which can be shared (or not), and mixed (or not) as desired.
Suddenly, I’m craving a trip to IHOP, what with all the waffling I’ve been doing over this… 🙂