Comment by evanelias
14 hours ago
Ironically, one of the original major reasons WordPress became popular was its dynamic nature. It dethroned Movable Type, which was an extremely powerful and extensible static site generator.
It's wild to me that this post's timeline makes no mention whatsoever of Movable Type, and at one point it links to another author's post titled "A Complete History of Static: The Beginning to WordPress Headless" which also makes no mention whatsoever of Movable Type. Now I feel old :/
To my surprise, Movable Type is still being developed even today. Wonder if there's some companies still using it out inertia. I know many moved off of it back when they restricted their free tier
I haven't kept up with it in recent years, but I know it remained popular in Japan for many years longer than elsewhere. AFAIK since 2011 it has been developed by a Japanese company, who acquired Six Apart's former subsidiary there, as well as the brand name.
It's also interesting that so many people in this thread are saying "What I really need is a SSG that also works as a CMS with a GUI" -- that's literally what Movable Type excelled at. Especially versions 4 and 5, which had a FOSS edition. A number of major US media sites were powered by it for years. However because it was written in Perl, that became a huge negative point as Perl fell out of use in the industry.