Contentful vs. Movable Type

Coming from WordPress, Contentful feels like content management as it should be. There's no clutter to get rid of, you can simply start building from scratch, and the end product is perfectly tailored to your or your clients needs.

Incentivized

For the purpose of simple, day-to-day blogging, Movable Type will get the job done. As I mentioned before, it has an intuitive UI so that most beginners can pick it up and build a simple blog post. But if you're looking for a CMS that will host multimedia content, interactive content, or any "fancy" production that goes beyond paragraphs and bullet points, then I would recommend something different - maybe even a custom CMS for the maximum control over your website's back-end coding. Keep in mind that the CMS does have some quirks and can be finicky, but the support staff is extremely helpful and available.

Incentivized

• Contentful provides organized, flexible data models with support for a variety of data types and content editors (e.g. WYSIWYGs, form fields, raw text areas).
• Contentful has great built-in versioning features with history and draft states so it's easy to make updates and revert when needed.
• Contentful has an intuitive user interface and good support for multiple spaces (which can be helpful for companies that need separate projects for dev/staging/production).

Incentivized

• Once you understood how the MT language and framework worked, customization wasn't too difficult.
• Allowed for levels of user access.
• Ease of creating RSS feeds.

• Preview of changes prior to publishing
• The ability to use a spell check plug-in when working on content (it doesn't work well with Grammarly)

Incentivized

• While it's beneficial to be able to assign administrative rights to a user so they can only post to certain places of a website, I can recall that Movable Type did not inform general users of the types of privileges they had. So, for example, when I knew I needed to make a posting to a certain area, and was unable to do so, I was not informed that I did not have access to make that posting. It would have been helpful for Movable Type to post a message on the screen, saying that I needed more permissions. This was very frustrating, especially when I was on deadline for a newspaper story.
• Unfortunately, (or fortunately), I do not recall other negative experiences. I thought it was a pretty clean, friendly interface.

I think there are still improvements to be made. I haven't tapped in to the full functionality of the CMS yet but the rating I give it now is only based on what I've been able to use it for

Contentful was affordable and much simpler than the Java based systems and preferred over a PHP solution

Incentivized

Movable Type is better than Wordpress because it generates static sites that cannot be broken by losing your database connection. The custom fields in MT are superior to Wordpress because of the way the fields are presented in the new content form. You need to get paid plugins in order to get that kind of functionality in Wordpress. Most of the templates in MT can be customized with greater control because you're provided with more templates.

• There was no negative impact as such.
• Positive impact is increase in sales.
• More work is delivered due to reusability and other features within a time and less manual effort.

Incentivized

• Movable Type definitely increased employee efficiency. Having everyone on the same platform to edit multiple websites from system is crucial.
• Expanding our website presence was a super simple process with Movable Type. All we needed to do was add another site, destination folder, and we're ready to go.
• Having all of our web designers on the same platform helped immensely with communicating information and structuring education for new employees.