15/05/04
80Move away from MovableType?
To put it mildly, there has been a little brou ha ha over SixApart’s announcement to charge for MT 3.0 (for a more level headed opinion, go read Jason Santa Maria’s thoughts, which echo my own exactly).
However, I’ve been considering moving away from MT for a while, as it has always irked me having to rebuild so much. Now that my journal is starting to get a healthy amount of entries, I can easily fix myself an omelette sandwich while it chugs away. It makes MT feel quite clunky for me.
One of the options I’ve been fiddling with for a few months is Textpattern, and its impressed me with the speed at which it allows me to work. One of its many nifty features is a preference to automatically close comments on entries after a cetain length of time. This is the best way to defeat comment spam, and I’m not clever enough to know how to set up a cron job to do it for me.
There’s a lot to overcome with TP though – it has its own idiosyncratic names for things – e.g ‘forms’ are not actually ‘forms’ but ‘reusable chunks of content’. Another drawback is that you’ll have a hard time getting to run in ‘clean URL mode’ on certain servers. If you’re using server where you have access to the config files all well and good, but many may find it a bit torturous to get it working on their shared server hosting account. Nevertheless, its an attractive possibility.
The other option that I’m starting to consider is Wordpress, which has been Eric Meyers choice of CMS. I’m trying this out now, and I’ll let you know what I think. My initial run with it was very encouraging.
There are still many advantages for me to stay with MT. Its very flexible, and lends itself to content management outside the world of blogging. For instance, a single installation of MT can be used to power multiple blogs easily – thats how this site works, a blog for every section. With tools like Wordpress, you have to create a new installation every time, and if using the same database, create a new table prefix to avoid wiping over other data. MT also give you more options, other than the standard ‘Title, Body & Excerpt’ fields. This was vital when I created my portfolio site.
So no decisions yet. If MT 3.0 is the right tool, I will pay for it, but I’m feeling led away from the chugging…
Tags: cms, movabletype
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tim said 1698 days ago:
The other option of course is to design your own system :)Patrick Fitzgerald said 1698 days ago:
Regarding the chugging, keep in mind that Wordpress just changes who does the chugging, and how often.In the case of MT, you chug the whole site once when you publish, while with Wordpress you chug every time someone hits your page. (where chugs = hits the web server, file system, and the database). So if you suddenly get deludged by hits, you have a much greater need for resources.
It also seems that MT has an advantage for editing multiple blogs, but Wordpress will be adding that feature "real soon now", so I'll evaluate then.
Eric Smith said 1698 days ago:
Do note that MT 3.0 will let you "chug" in the background. Instead of a pop-up window that you have to wait on, instead you just click a link and it does it in the background transparently to you.That said, on their site there was some caveat that it wouldn't work on all systems - didn't read into any further than that.
Jon Hicks said 1698 days ago:
True, but for someone like me who fiddles with templates a lot, has to delete spam comments etc, its more than once a week that I chug.Lets keep this going - we'll get Chug into the dictionary yet!
Eric Smith said 1698 days ago:
Do you use MT-Blacklist on here and still have spam issues?I have installed it on all of my blogs and it made for a huge decrease in my spam comments.
Jason Santa Maria said 1698 days ago:
Yes, I have heard that MT 3.0 rebuilds much faster. This was one of their big issues with building MT 3.0.I have also read (now I can't find where) that the speed bump to rebuilding is boosted my using MySQL.
Rad S. said 1698 days ago:
I've converted my blog to Textpattern, and I'm loving it. My only complaint is that it requires a little too much work to add a section, and as you said it's not completely server-friendly. Sections aren't added too often, so this doesn't become much of a problem once you're done with initial creation.Personally, I love the forms concept. Certian tags are allowed to take a specific form, so you can have a custom form and keep your code squeaky clean.
You can find a Movable Type to Textpattern converter here:
http://forum.textpattern.com/viewtopic.php?id=1490
The main reason I don't like WordPress is that there is no built-in way of handling static pages without some major hacking.
Also, you should read about Six Apart's license revisions and clarifications:
http://www.sixapart.com/log/2004/05/movable_type_30.shtml
Anyways, finding blog software has just gotten a lot more complicated.
kartooner said 1698 days ago:
John:I just made the jump from MT to Wordpress and to be honest it was a seamless process. The Import feature for Wordpress is fantastic. I had 300+ articles that imported in a matter of seconds.
It took a bit of work to tweak my CSS file and get used to Wordpress tags, but nothing that made me pull my hair out.
I already see a variety of benefits of using Wordpress over MT. One being that its Open Source of course, of which I support wholeheartedly. Another benefit is dynamically generated pages versus rebuilds.
I used Textpattern before settling on Wordpress because it just doesn't offer the features I need. But, it's a great CMS as well.
I don't know, it's personal preference at this point. I'm just glad that we (as a community) have choices and aren't shut in by a CMS monopoly.
kartooner said 1698 days ago:
Sorry Jon, misspelled your name. :) I'm used to writing it with an 'h'.I was "chugging" along in my post and didn't realize the mistake until now.
ak said 1698 days ago:
i suggest to build your own, that's what i did when i had gotten tired of mt. in fact, i've decided that with everyone considering leaving mt that i would release my own code. if you want it to give you some ideas (if you want to code your own system), give me an email at blackhole at alexeeny dot com. good luck, either way!Anne said 1698 days ago:
With a few tweaks you can make WordPress run multiple weblogs as well. Mark from neo.dzygn.com has done this for a project I believe. You could propably ask people from #wordpress for suggestions and help as well, like Mark Pilgrim did.Neil said 1698 days ago:
Well, I've paid for MT3 already, even though I'm considering a similar move for similar reasons as Jon.Why would I pay for software I may stop using? Because I have been using MT ever since it was first released, and the amount of time and effort it saved me was worth it. If it wasn't for MT, I probably wouldn't have kept up my personal site in the first place.
Good software is worth paying for and supporting. Yes, MT has some limitations, but on the whole it has completely changed how I interact and work with my site, for the better. That has value.
I think the thing that really saddens me is the incredible amount of vitriol that has been splashed around. Two and a half years of goodwill and FREE usage, and suddenly SixApart have become an evil company because of this? People really need to get some perspective.
Lars said 1698 days ago:
Yeah, chugging (now there's a word they don't teach in Swedish schools) takes time regardless of which, but with Movable Type it's your time, whereas with WordPress it's the server's time.Whose time would you rather waste?
I'm certainly no db expert, but relatively reliable sources have informed me that the server load rarely gets that heavy with a moderately sized PHP/MySQL setup, partly because the hits get spread out over time, partly because MySQL is fast. This of course assumes the coders know what they are doing, but I have a lot of confidence in the WP dev team.
Plus, Eric Meyer isn't the only high profile (and, assumingly, heavy traffic) guy to be on WP. Mark Pilgrim and Joe Clark also switched recently.
Actually, Mark, in case you haven't read his post today, makes an excellent case, not so much for WP as against non-open source and non-free software: Freedom 0
.
Tomas said 1698 days ago:
Mark Pilgrim has switched to Word Press? I'm pretty sure he's running MT 3.0, with TypeKey enabled comments?Jon Hicks said 1698 days ago:
It would be a concern if the chugging was placed onto the server, and therefore the user. However, I haven't noticed any differences on WordPress sites that I've visited.
Make my own? Just how much spare time do you all think I have? ;o)
Eric - I used to have Blacklist installedm but then it started rejecting peoples comments if they contained the letter 'e'! I haven't got around to asking Jay Allen about it yet, but I've just been closing comments. Its worked as well, if not better.
Kartooner - don't worry, most people get it wrong! Too busy chugging eh? You see the problems it causes! Good to hear WP working out for you.
Neil - thats a good point. Its the same for me - if it wasn't for MT, I wouldn't have started blogging.
Tomas - he's just switched! Read http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/05/14/freedom-0 for more...
Lars said 1698 days ago:
Did no one see the link to Mark's post in my comment?!?I even made a much nicer link than Jon, and this is the reward I get, tss...
Jon Hicks said 1698 days ago:
Well Tomas missed it so I thought I'd just repeat it.Goran Anicic said 1698 days ago:
My choice BBloghttp://www.bBlog.com
Hans said 1698 days ago:
Yay! Somebody has actually heard of TextPattern!I would recommend TextPattern very much, as it is quite intuitive, easy-to-use, and organized. However, if you've been working with MT for a while, it might take some time to get used to some terms and such ("forms" e.g.). It was easy for me since (almost) started fresh with TP. I tried Mt once, but it proved too confusing and I found that wretched REBUILD button too much work.
And yes, I also wish that "forms" were called "chunks" or "snippets" or maybe even "includes."
Kevin Davis said 1697 days ago:
Wow Jon, you really put a lot of thought into this sort of thing. I just marched into the upgrade process of 3.0 and ended up corrupting my database...The good news is that I finally figured out how to configure the mySQL database. So, I'm wondering if it might be possible to avoid the rebuild button by using PHP to call items directly from the database? I sometimes wish the software could do this by default, rather than building and rebuilding static pages.
Jeff said 1697 days ago:
I think Kevin may be on to something! Dynamically calling the database info instead of rebuilds would be awesome....OR just like every other descent CMS!
Jon Hicks said 1697 days ago:
Yeah, I've wondered this. I kind thought that some bright spark would've already implemented this, but I've searched and it appears not. Surely it would be possible...One thing that has irked me about MT 3.0 - there is no information on what is different in this edition. The piece on the homepage links straight to the store for buying, which is jumping the gun a bit! Am I missing some obvious link somewhere? Kevin - can you tell us what's new (other than TypeKey)?
Mark Wubben said 1697 days ago:
WordPress has a great admin interface and you can hack away at it pretty well. If you're proficient with PHP I'd advise you to use WordPress.About WordPress' template tags, I find them annoying. Most of them directly output the result when you call them, which means you have to hack them if you need the result in PHP. But then, this isn't hard.
On my site I use WordPress for it's admin section and to manage the content. Using mod_rewrite I instruct WordPress and I'm using a template engine to generate the output. This combination is really powerful and it allows for quick development.
Sian said 1697 days ago:
I'm on MT3.0D. It does rebuild much more quickly and dealing with comments is so much easier, it now has a comments and trackback interface similar to the edit posts one where they are listed in order of date made.Michel Fortin said 1697 days ago:
I'm trying to build a small yet powerful solution to build web sites -- like a blog -- using templates in MovableType style.The program is half done and not public yet. If smart PHP knowledgeable people are interested in making it progress faster, maybe I could open the development process. Here is a small description of the project.
Jeff Minard said 1697 days ago:
I built my own blog software - twice. One is my categorized, comment enabled blog, and the other is a blog software package with no back end database requiremets, templates, multiple user support, and it downloads in a 5k rar file.The full one used to run my site (creatimation.net) isn't up for download. It's too hacked and personalized for that. However, the MiniBlog is available.
Point being, making your own blog software is the best way to go - for me. I would hate to be locked into a certain way of doing things as with MT, WP, TP, or anything else I didn't program. If it's my site, I want everything there to be my doing. I mean, if I want to change it - bam, it's done. If there is a bug, it's fixed. If I want a new feature, I just add it. While you do have to spend the time putting it together, debugging, etc, it's worth the time once you're done and you can say, "Hey - that's mine." I know I am very proud of my blog software.
Also, on the issue of generating html files VS. php rebuilding on client request:
With those two things said there are two things left.
My 43cents.
Jeff Minard said 1697 days ago:
oh damn, there goes my formatting. :-\Drew McLellan said 1697 days ago:
I guess a nice balance in the static vs dynamic pages issue would be for the pages to be generated dynamically for the first hit, and then stored to disc on until the page is next edited. A just-in-time system.I don't know of any blog tools that use JIT compilation, but it would be workable. Even as a strap-on (oo-er) front end to MT, perhaps.
FWIW, I've been using Textpattern for more than a year now, and have been extremely happy with it.
Jon Hicks said 1697 days ago:
Drew, sorry I meant to say that it was from reading your site that I first came across Textpattern. Then it clicked again when Dean announced the gamma back in Feb. The trials I've done do far have been good on my new server, and its looking more like a possibility.Scott Johnson said 1697 days ago:
More than once a week is certainly less often than once per hit. I really prefer MT's static HTML output to WordPress's approach.
Arnaud said 1697 days ago:
I read on a comment somewhere on another blog that the wordpress developers are working on a multiple-blog feature.Might be good to know it will get into it eventually.
lars said 1697 days ago:
A few months ago i wanted a weblog of my own and was looking around for a good log system.Because many other 'designey' weblogs were using movabletype i gave it a go and it sucked, mainly because of the building times. And because it would take me the same amount of time writing my own system as customising movabletype to my needs i wrote my own. It's powered by php and mysql and it works like a charm, no building time, easy customisable and fully w3c standard. It's called Opendir.nl and it's dutch.
Jeff said 1697 days ago:
I am currently (as I type) building my MT site because it seems like everyone else uses it. After reading all of this feedback, (and being about 75% done on the site that's taken me upwards of three weeks to customize in my spare time) I'm having second thoughts.Is there anything GOOD about MT?
Jon Hicks said 1697 days ago:
Jeff - there's plenty. There are a few reasons at the bottom of my post. In fact, the chugging is perhaps the only drawback.Tristan H said 1696 days ago:
Jon - I've switched from Movable Type to Wordpress before the announcement of their pricing -- my server is relatively slow, so the rebuliding time was in fact becoming prohibitive. WordPress is surprisingly fast and runs well on this server (though my load is nowhere near yours), so I doubt that will be a problem.The features of WordPress include everything you love about MT, minus the rebuilding. The interface is much better than MT, the plugin system in 1.2 is excellent, and it is easily customized. That, and I love the open-source nature, just as Mark Pilgrim said in his article.
WordPress is also in very active development, and it's getting better with each release, which means a lot. Upgrades, installation, and configuration are also relatively painless, which is always good.
Anyway, just sharing my experience with WP. Good luck with your CMS search!
Veerle Pieters said 1696 days ago:
Jon, I don't know if you're familiar with pMachine or ExpressionEngine? In your case it would be better to go for ExpressionEngine since that's more powerful and more a CMS then a blogging tool.I'm going to use ExpressionEngine to power my company's website. I'm very satisfied with the support and best of all the developers are Mac users ;-) I would give it a try since there are a lot of features, too many to write them down but instead go take a look at the pMachine website
Not to make this a sales pitch, they're offering now a competitive upgrade for $99 if you're using another tool.
Nathan Pitman said 1696 days ago:
Textpattern is great, I use it for my own blog. It's extremely easy to customise, flexible and free. :)Jon Hicks said 1696 days ago:
Veerle - do you use EE or pMachine on your blog? I had come across them before, but hadn't really looked into them, I guess because of the cost.Veerle Pieters said 1696 days ago:
Jon, now I am using pMachine but I'm planning on switching to ExpressionEngine because of its powerful features with modules etc. So when time permits (your own stuff always comes last) both our company's website and my blog will be ExpressionEngine powered.There is a 14 day demo of ExpressionEngine. Hope this helps.
Jon Hicks said 1696 days ago:
It does! Thanks Veerle, I'll give that a spin too. Its the ability to specify custom fields that I find attractive about EE.Jemal said 1696 days ago:
After looking at TextPattern's license.txt file a couple times, I can confirm that it's free, but not necessarily Free. It says that you can redistribute as long as the copyright stays on the files, but says nothing about changes, modifications, forks or anything else.Does anyone know what direction Dean plans to take with TP? It would be a shame to see all of these nice people switching to another system only to have the same thing happen again.
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/05/14/freedom-0
Kris said 1696 days ago:
Maybe it is worth taking a look at Pivot:http://www.pivotlog.net/
Mark Wubben said 1696 days ago:
If you want to run multiple blogs on WordPress right now, I can help you with that. It _really_ is a _hack_ though: not advised for general use.Jon Hicks said 1696 days ago:
Blimey - I've just tried out WordPress 1.2 (nightly builds) - what a difference! I can add custom fields, amongst other niceties! Woo-hoo!Tyler said 1696 days ago:
I would recommend you take a look at Sitellite 4 (sitellite.org). They have an open source and commercial version. The open source version is full featured, it just doesn't come with some of the add-ons they offer. Sitellite is more of a CMS than just a blog tool, but I'm sure it could be used quite nicely for a blog. They even mentioned in the forums about possibly adding a blog add-on. It's a very nice program. It's made by simian.ca and worth a look at least.Josh Williams said 1696 days ago:
I'm also working with ExpressionEngine from pMachine to build a client's site. I have never used it before, but was impressed with the feature set. The client already had a commercial license, so the cost was not a factor, however, with MT3 going a more commercial route, you do have to begin weighing features. EE could end up being a very powerful tool and formidable alternative to MT.Original Lars said 1696 days ago:
Yes, custom fields are new as of WordPress 1.2. Very nice.And the plugin architecture is excellent. Eric Meyer has already hacked a couple of nice ones, as have plenty of other folks. Give it a month or two, and you'll have equivalents of most major MT plugins available for WP.
And I can't stress enough the ease of installing and upgrading WordPress. After having struggled with MT, and its many requirements, I was almost shocked to see how easy it could be. Big difference.
The admin interface rocks too.
Original Lars said 1696 days ago:
Josh and Verlee, do you (or anyone else) know of any good comparison of MT and/or WP vs. EE?David said 1696 days ago:
I've been fortunate enough to tryout some of the mentioned softwares and am happy I chose MT for my site.I helped a friend to setup his own blog last weekend and we tried with TextPattern first, since his ISP didn't have all Perl-libraries needed for MT. Said and done, I installed it, made some templates and configured the blog.. Only to find out that it didn't bring what it promised without tweaking - such tweaking couldn't be done with his ISP so we removed TP and I gave him a blog on my own server. Said and done, 5 minutes later he was up'n'running with a customized blog.
If you want a software like MT you have to pay for it. In comparision the only one that is close to as good as MT is ExpressionEngine and as you've noticed, it costs money.
Conor said 1696 days ago:
I to was trying to decide on a blog tool to use when I eventually made the decision to just code my own. Keep in mind that it is no where near completion but so far I must say that I am pretty happy with it. I hope I have time to continue it, ya know homework comes first :)david gee said 1695 days ago:
I've been looking over a few of the available blogging tools and, to me at least, b2evolution seems to be a pretty good option. it takes the same server-generated approach as wordpress from what i can tell, but it supports multiple blogs and generally seems to be more powerful than wordpress. despite this, i've heard a lot of talk about wordpress lately - i'd be interested to know why it's considered a better alternative. multiple blogs are pretty much a necessity for a well-architected site of any size.i also agree that a blogging tool with a JIT approach would be very useful. i work on large-scale webapps, and in that world, JIT is standard for both JSP and ASP/ASP.Net.
i just noticed the real time previewing on this site, it's a very nice touch :)
Jon Hicks said 1695 days ago:
Thanks Tyler, I'll look into sitellite.- Conor, you make me feel so old! :o(
- Indeed. As I've used MT for the business end of my site, I'm a fully paid up commercial user. I have no qualms paying for software, I'm especially a sucker for Mac shareware. The thing is, WordPress 1.2 comes quite close to offering the same features - and it offers more, like the custom fields. Textpattern has a very nice admin interface and is very capable. Its very 'writing friendly'.
Lars (the original!) - have you seen this article?
http://www.padawan.info/weblog/movable_type_vs_expressionengine_a_comparison.html
Jon Hicks said 1695 days ago:
Anyone else who's looking at other options, might find this rather handy:http://unbounded.org/archives/000169.html#more
Original Lars said 1695 days ago:
Thanks Jon. No I hadn't seen those articles. Very useful.I should say that I'm asking about EE for a non-profit I'm involved in. WordPress is more than enough for my weblog.
I'd also like to state, if only for the record, that I'm in no way against 6A's decision to charge for MT. From what I have been able to see from the debate, it was a good idea that was implemented with bad strategy, particularly communications-wise.
I sympathize with the reasons for switching that Mark Pilgrim oulined in his article, but the main reason I'm touting WP's horn here is mostly because I'm a happy user.
And oh yes, I'm the original Lars, at least in this thread!
Conor said 1695 days ago:
Sorry I make you feel old Jon but web developers are getting younger and younger and I guess Im one of them. Like in said my system is very early in production but I think its coming along pretty nicely. In the programs I did experiment with though I would say that word press was my favorite.Neil said 1694 days ago:
I just found a pretty major showstopper to any possibilities of a CMS switch for me. For a long time I used MT-Textile on my site, as I really found it helped speed up writing entries.When John Gruber released Markdown, I switched to that. The beautiful thing about Markdown is it is very, very close to how I format emails, so for me it's very fast, and works beautifully.
WordPress looks good, and has plugins for Textile and Markdown, but you cannot use them simultaneously. This means I either go through all of my entries updating them to a certain plugin's formatting, or stay put.
For now, unless I can find another solution that can address this somehow, I think I'm going to stay put. My site is mean to be fun, not suck up time I'd rather be using for other things...
Oh, and Jon, your unsubscribe mechanism for the comments is broken - I keep getting errors when I try to unsubscribe from this thread.
Jon Hicks said 1694 days ago:
My feelings exactly.
Neil - That is a major problem. I've unsubscribed you by the way, sorry for the inconvenience.
joris said 1694 days ago:
U should take a look at http://nucleuscms.org/. It's loaded with features en there is a growing community who deliver lots of plug-ins.Matt said 1694 days ago:
Sorry I'm a little late to this.First of, if you have any qualms about speed and performance, you have nothing to worry about with WordPress. I host MT sites that get hundreds of thousands of hits and I host WordPress sites that get double and triple that, and I can say that the WP sites are much easier on the server. And we haven't even added caching yet. :)
Jon, if you have any questions or problems with WordPress I'd be happy to personally assist you. My email is in the comment and I'm saxmatt02 on AIM.
Jeremy S. said 1694 days ago:
WordPress is a great system. if you're considering a switch, please take a good hard look at WordPress.I've been using it for so long, I've just loved it.
Jon Hicks said 1694 days ago:
Matt - how nice to see you round these parts!I think I've ruled out EE so far - so its between my current MT installation, Textpattern and Wordpress. I have to say, TP's admin interface beats Wordpress - its neat, well layed out and designed. Not that WP's looks bad, it just doesn't have quite the same polish.
Its not something to base a decision on (I can change the stylesheet if it really bothers me).
Matt said 1694 days ago:
I agree TP has a slicker admin interface, and that's something we're working on for the next version as well. It has come a long way, but it still has a long way to go before I'm happy with it. If you have any suggestions or contributions in this area send them my way.Jeff Clark said 1693 days ago:
REALLY COOL: As I've been searching around for something to build my site in, I was getting sick of downloading, installing, configuring then deciding that it wasn't that good or what I wanted.A buddy told me about http://www.opensourcecms.com. The site has all the big blogger and CMS software packages installed on it's server, and lets you play with each one as the admin!
If you've seen this site before and I just happen to be incredibly behind the times, sorry. But it's saved me so much time today (and it looks like I too may be joining the ranks of TP!)
padawan said 1693 days ago:
Jon, if the main problem you have with MT is the rebuild time, then it's easy to fix by modifying your templates. I'm using a combination of weblogs and SSI (server side includes) that require no site rebuild contrary to the default templates that come with MT. The design of those templates is to blame, not MT per se.Also note that the custom fields you find in both EE and WP are sure ways to lock you in one of those tools, so ponder the plus and minus of switching (which, IMHO, is not worthy IF your main concern is just MT rebuild speed.)
Matt said 1693 days ago:
I don't think custom fields locks you in to a tool any more than multiple categories. It's something software didn't used to do, and now it's a standard and you can move multiple categories between platforms. I can't envision a serious tool that doesn't support it a year from now. WP is not commercial and not interested in lock-in. We will support whatever cross-blog import and export tools that come of the Atom project.Anil said 1693 days ago:
I'm kind of wondering what you're doing with your templates that you need to rebuild so many entries so often... it may just be that you're doing more than you need to. In addition to background rebuilds, MT3 is much smarter about what it chooses to rebuild, what it prompts you to rebuild by default, how it rebuilds when deleting comments (especially through the new comment management interface) and is much more efficient in the rebuilding process.If you need dynamic pages, we've included mt-view.cgi in the app for about a year as a dynamic page-generation option. And MT3 has much better archive paths by default, so you don't have to customize filenames or any of that silliness.
More to the point, you can be a development or services partner on MT3, selling installations or customization of the system, and we'll be offering discounts for resellers as well, in addition to the $20k we're giving out to plugin developers.
Todd Lambert said 1693 days ago:
I recently converted my site (ToddLambert.com) over to WP from MT... mainly because of the re-building and the "chug factor".It became tiresome with MT, although I had grown so used to it. But, now with WP I feel like I could never go back. It just seems way more efficient.
I did have some things that I had hacked into my MT installation that were not in WP... but I've recently hacked those into WP now, and so I feel that I am almost completely back to where I was before, but minus the whole "chugging" thing. (You know that this blog is undeniable truth when it comes time to prove the origin of that word, right?)
Patrick Fitzgerald said 1693 days ago:
I previously wrote:I just visited WordPress.org to check their development blog, and it seems their database is down or overloaded (the wiki is not working either - says "overloaded").
This situation points out the disadvantage of a dynamic system vs. a system like MT: if your database goes down, you've got no blog.
Personally, I still plan on using WordPress when they release 1.2.
padawan said 1693 days ago:
Sorry if this sounds stupid but what do you mean by "chugging"?jboy said 1692 days ago:
I use a hand rolled editor to do all my publishing and also for my clients i code in asp also.Hence the peeps at MT have bills to pay, and to also feed themselves so why are people moaning, supporting them is what you should all be doing.
It's an embarrassment that the "web community" are acting like this
They have helped shaped the community so why not help them back, not by saying i'm off to use WP but here's my $19 make it better for the next version.
They are not running anywhere so show some appreciation i'm not referencing the free money you donated yesterday.
The best things in life are not free.
01// Tim had the best idea make your own!
Jon Hicks said 1692 days ago:
jboy, I don't know if that was a general comment or if it was aimed at me.If its the latter you really should read the entry and the comments before launching off like that.
I have neither the time or skills to make my own. I'm a freelance designer with a young family. If I have such a thing as spare time, its spent with them! :o)
Tim said 1692 days ago:
Jon, I'd be interested to know why you ruled out Expression Engine. I used pMachine since beta and Expression Engine and I can't fault either of them. I'm migrating my personal site and am also building an intranet site for a big NHS hospital department with 15 separate publishing groups, all with a single front template and multiple embedded templates plus over 300 categories. Its super fast too, which I put down in part to template and tag caching. Its easily the most flexible system I've seen (have installed and tested around 10 systems although not claiming to be an expert in any) It does, however, have a fairly steep learning curve and is only at release 1.0 (although this seems to be a very solid build). Now, having brought up a system you already discounted, I'm gonna be even more irritating and ask, off-topic, how you do the live preview I'm seeing before my eyes?jboy said 1692 days ago:
Oh Jon i wasn't aiming "i wouldn't even attemp to" at you, but just the web community as a whole. If i coded in php i would probably use it but i'm use asp.Family and spare time that's why i don't work full time anymore!!
Jon Hicks said 1692 days ago:
Sorry, I missed out on some replies:
Padawan - 'Chugging' is my word for the process of rebuilding in MT. This happens every-time you delete a comment or want to to change a template.
Anil - Thanks for dropping by! I'm sure I do rebuild more than I need to, but its mainly when tweaking the templates. Just the way I work I guess. Does using the mt-view.cgi option proclude the use of php?
Tim - The situation with EE is this: I'm waiting for my ISP to install Zend Optimiser so that I can give it a trial run. So far, I've only played with the online demo, and I expected more of the admin interface. It seemed a little under-designed. In the meantime Textpattern has grown greatly in my affections. I was a bit rash with the discounting remark though - its not out of the running yet.
I've also been urged to try b2evolution...
Another reason for changing CMS, is that I'm redesigning the journal section - quite a different design actually, rather than this hacked-version-of-the-rest-of-the-site-to-make-the-page-display-long. I feel the need for 'all change', but only if its worthwhile changing.
Anyway I regret that this post has sort of got mixed up all the anti-sixapart polemic thats drowned blogs in the last week. Just to restate my position - this isn't a whiney "I'm not paying for MT 3.0!", its a "I tried out textpattern a while back, and I rather like it. It got me thinking.."
Francois PLANQUE said 1688 days ago:
Jon,As the maintainer of b2evolution and with all the thinking you are putting into this, I'd be really interested in your comments about b2evo if you try it indeed.
I think you will appreciate the comprehensive multiple blog management as well as the collaborative comment spam blacklist where all b2evo users can share a centralized blacklist of spam URLs/keywords. Your local blacklist almost always gets updated before the spam hits you!
Anyway, if you have any concerns after trying b2evo, I'd be pleased to discuss them with you ;)
-François.
Graham said 1687 days ago:
Francois forgot to mention that b2evolution also supports generation of a static front page, with your permalinks, comments and other pages pulled dynamically. This is of course, optional.Huw Loosley said 1686 days ago:
Have you thought of using a CMS like Drupal? Its PHP and mySQL based and has some support for MovableType modules (although I cant say I have any experience of that). There is also a MT template someone has created,http://drupal.org/node/view/8088
mikey715 said 1685 days ago:
I'd like to suggest plog @ http://plogworld.org. That's the blog script I'm using on my site. I hope you look into it cause I find it really good. Well, it's just a suggestion. Thanks.Jeff Adams said 1682 days ago:
Jemal - As far as the Textpattern licensing goes it will be free here is a post by Dean Allen on the TP forum about it. http://forum.textpattern.com/viewtopic.php?id=1820I am just learning Textpattern and I love it, yes it does have some growing up to do and it is frustrating because of the lack of good documentation. Keep in mind that Textpattern is still in its pre-release state. But, I have had huge success with it and as soon as an official stable release comes out I will convert my business site to it.
I think Textpattern handles the use of multiple pages and sections much easier than Movable Type. You don't have to worry about how to tie seperate blogs together.
Jon Hicks said 1681 days ago:
At the moment, Textpattern is winning for me hands down. The way that a single installation can handle an entire site with such speed is amazing. Its tags a really intuitive too. No system is perfect, and there are a few things I miss in it, but development is going at a good pace. I feel sure that anything I miss will be covered either by a future release or a plug-in.