ORA blog: Avoiding CMS Data Lock-in, on how I decided to use Smarty Templates rather than a full content management system for the coming J-School site rebuild.
Music: 13th Floor Elevators :: Reverberation
Skookum Tools: WordPress, VideoCue, Dashboard
As WordPress has evolved and grown itself a larger, more supportive community and a larger body of plugins, I’ve become increasingly enamored of it, using it for more side projects. I also love that my hosting customers can install a WordPress blog with literally three clicks from their cPanel interfaces. On Monday I hooked up with Matt Mullenweg (co-creator of WordPress) for lunch, who got me totally juiced up about the advanced capabilities of WP. The biggest thing that’s held me back from a full-scale migration from MovableType is the fact that WP still doesn’t have multi-blog capabilities built in from the ground-up. At the J-School I have about 300 users scattered across 20+ blogs, all with varying levels of permission. WP has nothing like this… or so I thought. Turns out there’s an alpha version of a multi-user WordPress out there. Apparently, WordPress-mu is pretty much production quality despite being listed as alpha. Need to check that out.
Mullenweg, FWIW, is one of the sweetest, most charming guys you could hope to meet. Was very interested to learn that c|net uses WP (with a simple caching plugin) for a huge number of public publishing projects. Last I heard was that c|net had basically invented the massive Vignette CMS. Very interesting to learn they’ve basically abandoned their own baby in favor of simple, lightweight, open source tools.
Yesterday hooked up with Simon Clarke of Vara Software — I know Simon from the Adamation days (can’t believe there’s still a web site there), where he and another engineer were responsible for personalStudio (BeOS video editing application, later released for Windows). Vara is doing some really cool stuff, and I’ve decided to stop using Channel Storm’s LiveChannel for J-School webcasting and switch to Vara’s WireCast. It’s that cool, and won’t result in any loss of functionality. Also got a personal demo of Vara’s VideoCue — teleprompter software that also takes camera input, lets you mix in images and titles, output to QuickTime, and optionally post results directly to a blog. Skookum stuff.
Just emerged from a couple of sessions on building Dashboard Widgets and am totally fired up. Just need to clear a few days (yeah, right) and go for it.
MovableType 3 Sting
Completely sick of the comment spammers. MT-Blacklist is great at what it does, but only works after a string has been blacklisted, so every morning brings a heap of new garbage, “flies buzzing around my eyes, blood on my saddle.” Is the only viable long-term solution comment registration? To get that, you have to move to MovableType 3.0.
The J-School has been looking forward to MT3 for a long time, hoping for new features that would make it easier to manage the 17 blogs and 260 authors (with ~50 new authors added per semester) we currently support. What we didn’t anticipate was the new licensing scheme that could not only become prohibitively expensive, but a logistical nightmare as we try to track and pay for licenses for each new author, semester to semester. diveintomark has an excellent piece on why the “free enough” approach MT takes isn’t enough. Even if there’s a free version, tie yourself to a corporation and you’re subject to all their whims, prat falls, and unfortunate licensing decisions. Unless SixApart responds soon to my query on custom licensing, we’ll either be moving on to WordPress, a homebrew PHP/MySQL solution, or all of our blogs will be integrated into whatever CMS I choose for the rest of the J-School site this summer.
The licensing issue doesn’t apply to birdhouse — SixApart still offers a free version for non-commercial purposes. Disappointingly, MT3 offers almost no new features beyond comment registration. That’s okay – I’ve seen software revved to major numbers for minor changes plenty of times, and I wanted some real solution to the comment spam problem. So I ran the upgrade tonight. A few technical misfires (apparently not uncommon) — finally succeeded by installing the full version rather than the upgrade and then running the database upgrade script. Signed up for TypeKey, and received a token to drop into the new and improved back-end. Added the new DynamicComments directive to mt.cfg. But wait — after integrating the new comment registration tag into my templates, things fell apart. Not only were existing comments hidden from view, but when users clicked on the “Sign up to comment” link, they were told that birdhouse was not registered with TypeKey (it was). Screw it. Backpedal. Restore the original MT directory; fortunately it still worked, even though the upgrade script had modified some database structures.
MT3 is almost certainly a no-go for the J-School, and I’m increasingly skeptical about using it for birdhouse. There seems to be an MT –> WordPress exodus afoot, and I’ll probably join it. Lots of content out there on migration strategies.
Music: The Mekons :: Funeral
Speeding Up Movable Type
Pardon the dust around here recently. Have been growing increasingly frustrated with the time it took to post a new entry — as long as 80 seconds, and around 60 for guests to leave a new comment. The latter was becoming a genuine problem because people would get impatient and hit the Post button repeatedly, so I’d end up with duplicate or triplicate comments.
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MovableType as CMS
Preparing a database-backed site for J-School students to produce election-night coverage, and it occurred to me that I might not be giving MovableType enough credit as a generic publishing solution rather than pure blogging tool. With some deeper modifications to templates, removal of comments and calendaring, rearranged permalinks etc., there’s no reason MovableType can’t function as a full CMS. The Categories feature plays perfectly for creating “Departments” for the site. So far so good, but there are two problems with the scenario.
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