A Nerd Vent
December 29th, 2004I know I’m supposed to be all “dude, 2004 was awesome and here are 7,000 links to all the awesome stuff.”
Can’t do it. This is a geek entry. It shouldn’t make Leta less cute, though. Plus, Leta was born in 2004. That’s all you need to know, right there.
Anyway, I was going to write a big long message to the Movable Type Developer’s Network, because a certain hot-button issue came up for me. Namely, the way categories are used (and under-used) in Movable Type. Bear in mind that I have a headache, it’s late and I’m too lazy to go back through and change all the MT’s to Movable Type. If you see MT below, I meant to type Movable Type, but couldn’t due to holiday delirium.
Here’s what I was going to send:
I may have been a little glib about the category implementation, but I think the ability to have a template that is specific to a category (or group of categories) should be application-level functionality, not reliant on plug-ins. Regardless of philosophy about what the software does and where it’s going, the app [Movable Type] currently provides categories (and now sub-categories) as a way to display and sort content. It doesn’t allow for a very full range of options. As a result, brilliant plug-ins have been written to make up for the shortcomings of how Movable Type deals with categories. I just think it’s time for MT to step it up in this regard, and having spent three years using MT, it’s been my biggest hangup. MT has created such an enormous level of empowerment, I would love to see it get more powerful from the inside.
When we redesigned Dooce, we used a method described here to get the various category archives to render differently. My real-world reason for venting: what happens when a category is added? The main user (Heather) has to tell me she’s added a category and I have to go in and code all those includes and templates.
How should it work, then? When I make a new category, I should be able to assign an archive template to it. So for categories 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 9 and 15 archives, use Template A. Categories 3, 5 and 10 use Template B. How sweet would that be? Everytime the user adds a category, they associate an archive template with it. My life would be awesome.
I know that TextPattern has something like this, but why doesn’t Movable Type?
What if I wanted to do a site that had nothing to do with publish date but relied solely on categorization for it’s architecture? I’d have to jump through some big hoops with MT to accomplish this, particularly if I wanted the app to build my navigation. Previous and Next entry within a specific category isn’t something that I can do very easily with MT, either. I believe this should also be core application functionality, particularly for large sites that have loads of categories.
The other major issue with categories being juiced would be having to not sweat plug-in breakage with every major upgrade. That the tutorial and methodology linked to above is dated 2003 speaks to the need for a hard look at categories and their functionality within MT. It’s not just the template per category issue, either. It goes deeper into the app. Let’s say I want to show lastn entries for a particular category on every page of my site. It won’t work without some major gymnastics. It shouldn’t be so hard.
Jay Allen, I was being cheeky in my earlier email. Chalk it up to too much eggnog and chocolate and Aunt Lola’s toffee. But categories, man. Categories. Kind of like in The Graduate where the guy says, “Plastics, Ben, Plastics.”
I’m now going to upgrade my cloak of invisibility to a level 30 and throw a 20-sided die to determine whether or not my gonads will remain attached or put in the freezer. o
December 30th, 2004 at 12:28 am
You are such a geek.
December 30th, 2004 at 3:48 am
It could even go deeper than that. Basing content within an index template on the category of the post would be a useful, but requires jumping through some hoops at the moment. I know kottke does something like this for his site (movie reviews look different than weblog posts), but it would also be great in RSS 1.0 feeds where appropriate RDF terms could be used to describe category-appropriate content. However, this also brings up the issue of cramming various forms of data (weblog posts, movie reviews, links) into Movable Type’s static input fields (Body, Extended, Excerpt, Keywords).
Anyway, this is all a rather round-about way of saying that I wholeheartedly agree.
December 30th, 2004 at 5:10 am
Well put. The categories in MT are seriously under-spec’d. In order to do what SHOULD be able to be done with categories, you have to use a third party plugin and read heaps of technical crap and pray it doesn’t break everything, or use another blog instead and include that blog in your main blog.
Totally too much work for most people.
MT is still the best weblogging app I’ve used (and I’ve used them all - commercially and privately) but it still has some major areas where it just doesn’t cut the mustard.
Six Apart would do well to do a market research survey on their site for what existing MT users would like to see refined, developed or nixed.
December 30th, 2004 at 6:01 am
hey, i know this is somewhat unrelated (and you’ve probably remarked about this before, but i have the attention span of a 13 year-old with ADHD), but what do ya’ll use to counter the rush of comment spam? i’ve had a ridiculous amount of it lately (free online poker! FREE ONLINE POKER!!!), and have resorted to comment moderation, which is lame. me no likey lame.
December 30th, 2004 at 7:17 am
Jon, so by saying “This is what I was going to write to the MT Developer’s Network,” does this means you’re NOT going to send them your gripe about categories? Because I wholeheartedly agree with your reasoning. And you explained yourself eloquently.
Do it! Send it! Get drunk and THEN send it! Whatever works to get you to send it.
Sweetney, MT-Blacklist works for the most part. It’s not perfect but it helps.
December 30th, 2004 at 7:45 am
Wow. That is a hot-button issue.
December 30th, 2004 at 7:47 am
Bravo! I agree completely. Unlike the person who challenged you on the pronet list, I also think this is a core functionality issue–without it, categories are not nearly as helpful as they could be.
Of course, the subcategory implementation in MT3.1 is problematic, as well, as is the handling of multiple authors. I’ve got mini-rants of my own coming on that topic…
December 30th, 2004 at 7:48 am
Beautiful. I saw your exchange on ProNet. I have to say you’ve clearly expressed the frustration I’ve felt for ages. All MT sites I build use categories as site sections.
The MT way of modelling content just doesn’t support non-blog-type-data. This is fine, unless you claim to be a powerfull abstracted CMS.
One other point, once you’ve set your site up with categories as sections (about us, portolio, contact etc) what do you do about pagination? It would make sense that the section called “products” might need a way to accomodate 100’s of products while “contact” might just need room for a phone number. MT needs a server-side way to handle large categories.
Anyway.
This all reminds me of a series of bitchy fights on the old MGI list. It all boiled down to not particularly technical people squeezing functionality out of an app that was being asked to do more than it was originally designed for. Nothing wrong about a blog app that is brilliant at managing blogs and not much else, just don’t promise me the bloody moon with every upgrade:-(
December 30th, 2004 at 8:09 am
Wow.
I am just going to admit that I didn’t really go past the first sentence in the second paragraph before I started seeing -shdcfkianvf ksdnvisdfvw-.
I did read the last paragraph however.
Big Plastic Watches. :0P
December 30th, 2004 at 8:16 am
Great email - and I agree on all points. My entire site is in MT - about me, contact, and regular blog entries. I use categories extensively … but I ended up setting up additional blogs to handle some of my content. It was easier than using 14 plugins - and I got the result I wanted. It sure would be great to be able to say - hey all those entries in the static category? I just want those to show a single entry - and with this on the side. But the link ones - Just use the body as the link. Thanks MT. Instead - you have to go in hack a bit. Which is ok … but not ideal.
I still love MT though … I think it’s the most customizable CMS out there. I love that I can output to any format I want. I love that it’s constantly being improved. I love that if I can’t figure out something on my own … I’m 99% sure I can go on the forums and be able to figure it out.
But category specific templates would certainly my my glasses a bit more rose-colored.
December 30th, 2004 at 8:34 am
Interesting post, J.
I’ve been working for roughly 6 months on a personal publishing tool and the functionality you ask for is inherent to the system. There is a database table full of template pointers (paths), with a description, title, etc, for the admin tool to use in making it easy to keep up with various templates. There is another table that relates each category, subcategory, AND vernacular match (think keywords) to a template in the templates table. More importantly, you can have conditional template use for given content, enabling, say, multiple ways of displaying a given chunk of content depending on how a user accessed it.
I’m finished with the design of the system and am moving into implementation, and choosing between PHP5, which is fairly ubiquitous AND which is the subject of a book I’m finishing this week, and Java, which is just BETTER, but less accessible to personal users (versus companies, which is a core audience for my software). It’s a tough call.
Maybe you can chime in, or users here can. Would you switch hosts to a reputable Java (Tomcat) host in order to use a better tool? What if the hosting were to cost an extra $5-10 per month (as many Java hosts do)?
One of the big obstacles for me will be building a method to import old MT data into my system. Hopefully once I open the source I can get some help on that
December 30th, 2004 at 8:42 am
I now know why your main user swoons when you talk shop. Having to code it all must be a bitch, but then just take it out in kind. Have her break out the hot rollers.
December 30th, 2004 at 9:20 am
This basically sums up the major problem with MT (much as I love it so): Created by the design-minded rather than the programming-minded, so it’s just not as intuitive as it could be. But then, I’m not an expert on either, so perhaps I’m too judgmental when I get frustrated with the program. I’m just glad there are plenty of talented people willing to make some fantastic plugins for MT to bridge the gap.
Am I making sense? Probably not. I’m still groggy today, and it’s nearly lunchtime.
December 30th, 2004 at 9:41 am
I’ll bet you have a really big watch.
December 30th, 2004 at 9:50 am
Hey Jon, could you copy the ProNet list about this since the conversation started over there?
You make some very valid points and put forth a lot of interesting ideas. I would point out that much of what you want can and should be done using CSS (i.e. using the category as the class for the body tag and then styling accordingly) but certainly even CSS has its limitations.
Hoops do in fact exist for jumping.
I think the most concise statement that can be made about this whole issue came from Natalie above:
“The categories in MT are seriously under-spec’d. ”
The implementation of categories is a bit long in the tooth. It was part of MT a LOOOOOOOOONG time ago and the only significant upgrade it’s has is the inclusion of subcategories. To be honest, my two pet peeves with categories is the lack of ability to do faceted categorization and the ability to filter by date AND category (i.e. 2004/12/CATEGORY and CATEGORY/2004/12) without serious hoop-jumping.
I can promise you that you’ve been heard and that your criticisms have been received well. I like cheeky.
I can also tell you that this probably won’t happen for a little while though because we’ve got some other very big things up our sleeves for the immediate and mid-term future. But, we hear you…
Thanks for taking the time to lay out your vision.
December 30th, 2004 at 9:51 am
Hmmm, what?
December 30th, 2004 at 10:19 am
Jay - The CSS comment is valid if and only if you assume that all output should be viewed in a browser AND that semantic markup wouldn’t change based on context. As you essentially pointed out, templates aren’t about the presentation layer. The only question that pops up from that, though, is why you chose to speak about the presentation layer when the complaint is about templates
December 30th, 2004 at 10:24 am
I know there are thousands of folks who understand what you wrote, but I’m not one of them. All I can say is: I’m going to the Consumer Electronic Show next week and I get to see ALL the new gadgets.
December 30th, 2004 at 10:39 am
Jay - that sounded a little bitchy. Sorry. I was typing with one hand while stuffing a bagel into my face.
I’ll rephrase.
Your CSS comment is spot on for presentation, but as we all know, you often have to “massage” your markup for certain layouts and such. More importantly, though, since templates *shouldn’t* be about presentation (if only browsers had ideal CSS support), I would assume that Jon’s gripe, as that of so many others, and even myself when deploying MT for friends, is more about the inherent lack of flexibility. For instance, I’m a big fan of XSLT and I’d only want to use a publishing tool that allowed me to use contextual XML templates to output given content.
I’m not a MT user, but I’m a big fan and love how they have such a dedicated community. The software I’m writing is mostly to help meet the needs of commercial content publishers while providing free and easy usage to personal publishers who want to be able to break from the blog paradigm as MT has helped define it. Not because I think MT is bad or anything, but a good deal of my friends and clients are basically looking for publishing systems that allow for any number of datasources and presentation layers. They’ve sort of moved beyond (or perhaps just parallel) to what MT has to offer.
From the source I’ve looked at, it should be fairly simple to create relational mappings of categories/subcats to templates, though.
December 30th, 2004 at 10:50 am
I understood the first two paragraphs and the last one.
Good thing you’re good looking.
December 30th, 2004 at 11:00 am
Fuck sakes.
I just about went cross-eyed reading that. I just learned HTML and that post makes me feel like I am a kindergardener who has been told to read Proust.
December 30th, 2004 at 11:03 am
Should I be worried that this makes sense to me now? But didn’t a few years ago before I met TobyJoe?
I’m not worried.
Jon, you constantly spawn discussions over here in the Bourdeaux/Howley household. And for that, I must thank you. It’s nice when someone’s blog can have that effect on someone.
December 30th, 2004 at 11:08 am
Well, to be fair, the discussions are spurred by Michele noticing you writing something about personal publishing and me spending all my time developing applicable software.
December 30th, 2004 at 11:22 am
Freak out! Le geek? C’est chic!
December 30th, 2004 at 11:26 am
How big of a f’n dork am I? The only thing I got was the D&D reference.
December 30th, 2004 at 11:41 am
“The only question that pops up from that, though, is why you chose to speak about the presentation layer when the complaint is about templates :)”
Because for a vast majority of people, the two are one in the same (not that they should be). But I addressed the rest of John’s post with my agreement that categories need work.
Exactly what we will do and when, I can’t say, not because I don’t know or don’t want to say, but because it is company policy not to discuss future features. We underpromise and overdeliver because we believe it’s better for everyone in the long run despite the downside of giving the feeling that we aren’t doing anything to address some people’s concerns.
Needless to say, there are a world of things going on inside of Six Apart that will not be made evident to the public until they are ready for download and installation. Hence, you should definitely judge us on our releases and not on what we say in the comment sections of peoples’ weblogs.
December 30th, 2004 at 11:48 am
P.S. Today marks the second time in two weeks I have spelled my husband’s last name wrong.
I’m such an asshole. Boudreaux.
December 30th, 2004 at 12:04 pm
TextPattern rules.
Basically all the points you made Jon, are what has made me the fan of TextPattern that I am today. It’s SO customizable. Maybe not the best interface going, but it’s easy to overlook with the functionality.
MT, Blogger, etc, etc ushered in a new era in web. All the content is displayed the same though. It’s getting old. If there are Categories, there should be templates assignable to each. It should be inherent to the app.
Send that email Jon.
Toby - your system sounds awesome! I’d love to hear/see more about it.
December 30th, 2004 at 12:07 pm
Thank you! This post taught me something valuable about myself: I’m a geek geek. I had no reason to read that, I don’t code anthing ever. But I read it, and what’s more, enjoyed it. I love to read about things people are passionate about and there’s no one more passionate than a geek on a rant. So geek on my brother!
[fails Boss avoidance saving throw, gets back to work]
December 30th, 2004 at 12:11 pm
Nick - you can email me to discuss any of the features. I can share the UML diagrams and db schemas with you as well. blurbomat at my username dot com.
December 30th, 2004 at 12:11 pm
oh, last thought I forgot to post above:
MT is not a free tool. People paying for it (and any other not-free blog tool) should be getting the BEST options and functionality around. When WordPress, TextPattern, and a bunch of other free and open source blogging solutions are out-functioning the for-pay tools, there’s something wrong.
Donate to TextPattern (or the like) and encourage its further growth instead of paying out-right for something that’s not cutting the frickin mustard.
[there, MY geek rant is over now. wish my wife got as hot about geek talk...]
December 30th, 2004 at 12:22 pm
Just switch to WordPress and be done with it. We are addressing all of these concerns in the 1.5 branch, as well as having Spam Karma which elimenates spam problems.
I would love to discuss this with you guys, or you could always hit up Matt the lead dev http://photomatt.net .
Or hell stop by the irc channel #wordpress on irc.freenode.net .
All the best to you and your family out in Mormon Land.
December 30th, 2004 at 12:44 pm
Yes.
December 30th, 2004 at 4:10 pm
I was sort of a test case for exactly the non-date-based organization that you talk about. My site is entirely categorized, regardless of date.
But since I’m not very smart (and wasn’t even aware of the Movable Type plugins for this), I couldn’t figure out how to make each category have its own template.
I eventually settled on just giving each archive its own set of images, then misnaming a few so that the feature image would be the appropriate one for each category. In other words, each category still uses the same template, but because they’re pulling images from their own folder, they each LOOK slightly different.
But the fact that I had to go to that much trouble for ONE different image per category section is stupid.
December 30th, 2004 at 4:12 pm
i suspect there’s a treasure trove of info in the comments, which i will peruse this evening after CX is in bed, but i have to say that (on your advice, jon) i upgraded to 3.14 and then my category archive page broke. it just broke. my monthly archives page–which used the same MT code, just for ‘monthly’ instead of ‘category’–was fine. so, i tried a few new MT tags, but still no luck. i didn’t want to re-code my &^%$*! site (or even one page; i’m lazy like that), and i admit that i wondered if i was a fool to have done the upgrade. well, today, with no rebuild, no nothing, the old code suddenly works again. ??!? so anyway, no, i don’t have a productive syllable to add to the discussion, just enjoying an (inappropriate?) opportunity to vent on the same topic.
December 30th, 2004 at 4:12 pm
I’m glad I’m not the only one having issues with MT and categories and templates. All I want is a different sidebar for certain categories. That shouldn’t have to involve me spending half of my lunch hour scribbling ideas onto a notepad as to how to accomplish this minor feat. (I’m quite the MT and PHP newbie, and I get excited when I figure out how stuff goes, especially coding.)
December 30th, 2004 at 4:32 pm
“MT is not a free tool.”
MT will ALWAYS have a free version[1]. What’s more, we’ve gone a step further and made it possible for people to secure a free commerical version[2] as well.
[1]: http://tinyurl.com/yt7pv
[2]: http://sixapart.com/pronet/overview.html
“People paying for it (and any other not-free blog tool) should be getting the BEST options and functionality around.”
Many would argue that they are.
“When WordPress, TextPattern, and a bunch of other free and open source blogging solutions are out-functioning the for-pay tools, there’s something wrong.”
While the two that you mention are great tools, I will point out that there are a large and increasing number of people who are thrilled with Movable Type. You may not be one of those and feel that these other tools out-perfom MT in the areas you care about and that’s fine. MT is no more good for every person than Wordpress or TextPattern are.
It’s all a matter of personal choice.
In closing, I should also point out that Six Apart is still growing and doing so quite quickly. Also, for the first time, there is one person who is solely focused on the development of Movable Type. That’s me. Neither Wordpress nor TextPattern have a full-time shepherd, not to mention a team of highly talented people who are paid good money to focus solely on development and support of the software. Yes, open source is awesome, but it’s not always the best model for everyone.
December 30th, 2004 at 4:38 pm
I think the issues that Jay brings up are exactly why I’m nervous to use other solutions for client work. While they are great tools, they don’t have the infrastructure that Movable Type does. That’s not to say the others aren’t suitable for client work, just that me personally, I’m sticking with Movable Type.
I’ve got another long-winded piece about content management and how it’s changed my life coming. I’m certain the fainting has begun in anticipation. At least I’m not talking about my wife’s underpants and how often I pee. Although, I’m sure many of you would love to hear all about my wife’s underpants. Not gonna happen. Unless something really funny happens.
December 30th, 2004 at 4:56 pm
“Underpants” is a great word.
For what it’s worth, Jon, I come here because I like yer stuff, not because I consider it “Dooce Lite” or “Dooce Part 2.” I’m glad you don’t feel the need to write about the same things รณ how boring would THAT be?
Thanks for the good discussions. Happy New Year!
December 30th, 2004 at 5:47 pm
Do what the man says! I’ve been wanting more category features for ages! And if we’re asking for features (which we’re not really, but this is a geek post, and geek posts need to be full of off topic things, and rambling things, and slating of Dave Winer. Why had Dave Winer not be mentioned yet? Didn’t he invent categories?) then can we have one that stops MT from creating archives for certain categories? That’d be lovely.
December 30th, 2004 at 8:49 pm
Panties! Glorious Panties!
yeah, let’s just stick to the geek stuff. I don’t really wanna hear about anyone peeing - unless it’s my son finally potty training!
JAY:
I realize my comments sounded rather harsh. I apologize as I didn’t mean them to be as such.
I’ve used MT a lot in the past (part of my website is still running on an OLD version of MT), and have setup a past client using it as well.
Jon’s got a good point of going with a known quantity in MT, which is piad to be there in a sense. TxP or WP could be gone tomorrow and it would be sad, and leave a lot of people in a lurch.
As for independant work, I’m certainly in the preference of TxP - it’s more my taste.
“Use what suits you best” is always a good position to follow. I’m one who tries out every new app and tool, especially at update times. so I’ll continue to look at what MT is doing on subsequent releases. I hope I can get as excited about it as you make it sound. Until then… cheers.
December 30th, 2004 at 8:57 pm
Speaking of panties, if this isn’t strange, I don’t know what is …
Today I wore Hanes bikini briefs and that made my boyfriend more hot than those stupid brazillian thongs ever did.
December 30th, 2004 at 9:14 pm
Speaking of which. Heather has totally got to photograph you in your temple garment underwear. While you sleep, if necessary. And then post the photos. She’s got us curious. Not that you’re a sex object, or anything, except insofar as a guy’s mind is definitely his sexiest bit. Fetching underwear surely helps, though.
December 30th, 2004 at 10:38 pm
I knew that talk of underwear would be bad. Heather is going to PAY.
One of the things that is a holdover from my Mormon-ness is the T-shirt part of the underwear. I don’t like wearing a shirt without an undershirt. Match that with anything on the bottom that is white and well, yeah. Match that get-up with a woman who gets a lot of glee out of her version of tickling me and I’m certain that like a bad nickname, this temple worker thing is gonna stick.
If I had categories, one would be: Things That Shouldn’t be Discussed Publicly.
There will be tickling. Lots of it.
December 30th, 2004 at 11:04 pm
Gaaahhh! No more underwear talk, please!! I actually looked up what Mormon underwear looked like awhile back. One of my friends is Mormon and until she mentioned it, I never knew. How funny is that?
I must admit that I use Wordpress (somewhat of a novice, but like it). I love their categories feature. Why doesn’t MT make it easier for their users like WP does?
Just curious.
December 30th, 2004 at 11:51 pm
“Why doesn’t MT make it easier for their users like WP does?”
Because we at Six Apart like making things more difficult so that our users feel a sense of accomplishment when they get the software to do what they intended. Making things easy is for sissies!
Seriously, read what I wrote above. I’m the Product Manager for Movable Type.
December 31st, 2004 at 12:09 am
i’m sure my secret decoder ring is in the mail. i will wait for it and come back to decypher this gibberish when it arrives.
by the way, since we’re not talking about what you just said, i’d like to say that i think spain looks like a lovely place to live. i know, totally off topic but so what.
December 31st, 2004 at 2:21 am
So, you could tell me… does your level 9 wizard beat my thrice-enchanted troll, bearing in mind, of course, that my troll is wearing the temple-garment-underpants?
But seriously… this is why she married you. Hell, right now I’d marry you, but much more of that insanely-smart-guy-stuff & my head would explode for ignorance.
December 31st, 2004 at 6:17 am
tobyjoe.. I was once a Java Apostle at a division of a company that no longer exists. The fact that PHP hosting is ubiquitously free and ASP.NET is ubiquitous and Java servers are almost nowhere to be found and pricey might make you think twice. I’ve found that Java has been pretty much relegated to the enterprise. The fact that every Java app you deployed had to be accompanied by one or another version of the runtime drove me bonkers. I had runtimes littering directories all over my hard drive.
I do everything in ASP.NET when I can, or PHP if I can’t. ASP.NET seems the result of sooo much more deliberate thought, too bad it’s sooo MS centric. And being a Java ripoff C# is … well Java on steroids. And Flash seems so WAY more ubiquitous but remoting is still way more difficult. I vote PHP for ubiquity. Open is ubiquitous. In Java, if you build it, will anyone come?
December 31st, 2004 at 9:29 am
Dabbler - I agree wholeheartedly about the ubiquity of PHP4. PHP5 is a far better language, though, and the adoption rate amongst cheap vhost companies is going to be quite slow. While I do want to allow for personal use, one of my major goals is to provide a framework+component package with a default build that allows for my commercial clients to meet their needs. I stay away from .NET as much as possible and absolutely despise code-behind and the difficulty in producing standards-compliant markup. That said, I do have to use it on occasion. C# *is* a great language. It’s quite nice.
Most of my clients want to avoid MS at all costs. This includes clients as large as the House Democrats and US Navy, as well as tons of consumer media companies. That pretty much puts my real need at either a LAMP system or Java. For LAMP, PHP5 or Python are my real choices. Most of my clients are more comfortable with PHP than with Python, but I’d put the number of hosts running PHP5 at the same level as those running Java. One thing that is pushing me towards PHP5 is that I imagine more of the free users will already have relationships with Linux hosts running PHP.
One additional thing, which constitutes nothing but unsolicited advice
Jon mentions only using MT for client work, and that seems dangerous to me. I’m not sure what type of clients you have, but I doubt every client wants a blog. MT is quite inflexible. If you want to choose a system that has great support and is powerful, check out Plone. Of course, if your clients *do* just want cookie-cutter blogs, stick with what works.
December 31st, 2004 at 10:28 am
“Jon mentions only using MT for client work, and that seems dangerous to me. I’m not sure what type of clients you have, but I doubt every client wants a blog. MT is quite inflexible.”
Actually, in my previous life before joining Six Apart, I did web consulting. One of my major tools was MT precisely for it’s simplicity and it’s flexibility.
The fact is, MT is a fabulous data entry and publishing engine if you set it up correctly. It has a large code base that does storage and data output better than I could code it myself in such a short time. What’s more, because of it’s APIs, my client never had to see the MT interface, as I could easily hook up a PHP front end that did all of the management my client needed without all of the other things that MT offered.
MT can really do anything — not just cookie cutter blogs. Just as an example, go and see http://www.jadfair.com. Every piece of content on that site is published by MT.
All you have to do is throw away the default templates and realize that the MT tags represent placeholders for data. Combined with the hundreds of plugins and the APIs, MT is anything but inflexible.
Plone, on the other hand, is a FAR more complicated system that would have been totally unsuitable for my clients. If I had given them that, they would have cursed me for ages, I promise you.
MT gave me the ability to give my clients exactly what they wanted at a very low price and provided the ability to grow as their needs grew.
December 31st, 2004 at 10:41 am
Jay - first, I love Jad Fair!
Second, I think we have fundamentally different clients, and I think that provision was covered above to a small degree. I see that MT can do more than cookie-cutter blogs, and the phrase was misused, certainly.
My clients most often need powerful publishing systems with workflows, document management, real search abilities, premium content items, tight integration to Web service providers (Salesforce being a big example), etc. I think the difference in clients is really what I wasn’t fully taking into account.
I agree that Plone is pretty complex, but it’s quite powerful and easily extensible with Python. I honestly don’t use it for anything but simple Intranet work, but I’ve seen it deployed for clients with needs similar to those of my own clients.
I’m sure MT has a place in client services, and was clearly ignoring smaller work like the example you provided. To that effect, my unsolicited advice was off mark. I assume folks who use MT exclusively would turn down work with requirements MT cannot easily provide via plugins.
December 31st, 2004 at 11:09 am
“Jay - first, I love Jad Fair!”
Yeah, he’s a hoot. Total technophone but yet loves what the web does for him in connecting him with fans.
“My clients most often need powerful publishing systems with workflows, document management, real search abilities, premium content items, tight integration to Web service providers (Salesforce being a big example), etc.”
Yeah, that’s not MT’s domain. No doubt about it.
“I assume folks who use MT exclusively would turn down work with requirements MT cannot easily provide via plugins.”
I would hope so. But then, I don’t know any developer who uses MT exclusively.
Happy New Year, by the way! (14 hours early)
December 31st, 2004 at 9:13 pm
Hijack. What size memory card should I buy for my new D70. Need to take it with me for a week (300 medium-sized shots) at a time. Also, I spend most of my life in the 2nd/3rd world where it’s hard to recharge batteries. Any thought on that one?
December 31st, 2004 at 11:11 pm
Jay & Tobyjoe:
FYI, I use Movable Type to do my portfolio: http://www.smoghat.com/jon/
It’s definitely not a blog.
Mimi: Get a SanDisk 1 gig or Kingston 1gig. Buy an extra battery, charge it and take it into the wilds? Don’t use your flash so much? I’ve shot about 1,000 shots before charging, but that’s natural light and minimal monitor usage.
Thanks everybody for a GREAT thread!
January 2nd, 2005 at 6:27 am
“Neither Wordpress nor TextPattern have a full-time shepherd, not to mention a team of highly talented people who are paid good money to focus solely on development and support of the software.”
I work on WordPress full-time — I can’t claim to be talented but I am paid. We do have a rather large talented base developing the product, but just because they work for love and not money doesn’t mean their contributions are any less valid.
As for the long-term viability of Open Source code, I think it’s more stable than propietary alternatives because the license is a known quantity rather than liable to change with the current owner, pricing structure, corporate strategy, or weather. That’s why companies like IBM and HP are betting the horse on Open Source and a majority of the internet is built with or served on Open Source products.
What blog software should you use? Whatever works for you.
It’s 2005 now, there’s no reason for anyone to be dogmatic about blog software when there’s such consistently high quality amoung the main players in the field.
January 2nd, 2005 at 11:13 am
Matt,
You are right about software like FreeBSD and Apache and sendmail.. However, I think my original rant was directed at Six Apart for a reason: I want to use their product for things besides blogs. Blogging software has come a long way in the past half dozen years, and by enabling easier publishing, content management and implementation, it seems logical to push blogging software to do more than blogs.
If any of the alternatives (open source or not) are suited to this kind of development, it would be an effort focused on publishing and on developing products around publishing.
I think it’s great that you are paid to work on WordPress. The web publishing space is getting interesting. I don’t think you can fault Jay for being excited about new directions that his company and his product are moving. I don’t think he was trying to invalidate other software, just plug his baby.
Thanks for your comment.
January 3rd, 2005 at 8:36 pm
I don’t think you can fault Jay for being excited about new directions that his company and his product are moving. –djblurb
You are absolutely correct.
I don’t think he was trying to invalidate other software, just plug his baby.–djblurb
I have to disagree here. Jay was either: intentionally positioning MT above the open source alternatives by highlighting a perceived down-side, or he has a real problem with wording things.
Not that I have a problem with him highlighting what he perceives as an added value that MT has that is absent in WP et al, I just think we should call a spade a spade. I have a lot of respect for Jay and MT so now harm no foul, and I think Matt would say the same.
I mean he has actually *hung out* with those… people.
January 7th, 2005 at 7:24 pm
Oh, jay-sus people. No, I wasn’t denigrating WordPress, TextPattern, Open source or grandma’s apple pie. I was expressing excitement for the future of Movable Type.
As I said above, Movable Type hasn’t had a full-time guardian in years. That’s a MAJOR thing. And as amazing as open-source is about collaborative development, having the same team working on the software as their main job (as opposed to doing it at night after work, after the kids go to bed, when they have some time) is a major thing.
I’m not denigrating open source software. I LOVE open-source software. I’m just saying that MT’s development has been hampered in the past by conflicting and muddy focus and the building of a business from two people to 70+ (and growing).
Now things are back on track.
Matt said: “I work on WordPress full-time”
CNet pays you to work on WordPress exclusively? I had no idea. That rocks and I’m duly impressed with CNet.
“We do have a rather large talented base developing the product, but just because they work for love and not money doesn’t mean their contributions are any less valid.”
DEFINITELY don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t saying that at all. I was saying that there is a difference between working on something full time and working on something in your off-time when you get the chance.
Anyway, again though, I don’t really care to compare between WordPress and MT. What I WAS meaning to compare was MT in the past to MT now.
“I mean he has actually *hung out* with those… people.”
Huh? Who’s he and “those…people”? Should I be insulted?