In one of the stranger displays of MT's customizability, Mark Carey has announced a set of application templates that pretty convincingly make MT look like WordPress. Functionality isn't complete, but it's an initial release, and still a pretty impressive stunt. A demo is available at his site.

I have to admit I've never entirely understood making one application arbitrarily look like another, and hope that if Mark continues with this he'll move toward making it ultimately stand on its own rather than just mimicking WP. My thoughts are incomplete, but I'm not quite convinced this is too useful (yet?) beyond the learning experience; a more "pro" view of the MT Wordpress interface can be found over at MajorDojo with "Movable Type is whatever you want it to be" but I should make clear I'm not against the idea here, just the execution. While taking inspiration and adapting elements from other systems is fine, this skin also adopts several problems in the WP admin such as how the main dashboard uses so much room telling you more about WordPress and the community than about your own installation. This among some other things to consider are brought up in a video recently posted by Michael Heilemann, which promises to become a series. Many of these issues appear to have been addressed in the new interface being developed for WordPress' 2.5 release slated for March.

The MT interface has its own problems, of course, which is why I'd find a melding of each application's good parts more interesting. Jesse Gardner has been threatening a more gentle facelift of the MT admin for a little while. Maybe this announcement will give him a nudge to share his progress?

It should also be noted in passing that a re-skinning this drastic almost certainly breaks many if not all interface modifications make by plugins via Transformer callbacks. If you don't need any such plugins, then no problem, but that's not a risk I can assume, myself.