To add to the entry I made yesterday commenting on the MT4 v WordPress situation, I spent most of today upgrading Laura’s site from MT 3.3x to MT4. Admittedly it may not have taken that long to have just done an in-place upgrade, but then I doubt that that would have been anywhere near as clean a job. Here’s some observations on the Movable Type 4 product -

• The installer wizard didn’t work
• It’s not obvious how you create your own style rather than using one of the supplied ones
• Publishing a site takes an age, seems much longer than it used to be
• The template editor interface can be slow, and has rendering issues in IE7 with highlighted syntax
• The save templates function is buggy, and lost bits of templates
• The modular approach is much improved on earlier versions
• You can create your own widgets and drag n drop them into sidebars fairly easily
• Default rich text editor doesn’t allow html code
• The interface does look very swish and modern

That’s your summary. In detail, then -

There seemed to be an issue with the installer at the very first step. The install instructions (or at least one set of them, there seems to be mutliple versions each slightly different) said to put the mt-static directory outside of the main movabletype directory – which I did – but then the install wizard produced an error saying that it could not find the directory, and asked me to input the full path to it. Sadly, try as I might, nothing I wrote into that box was going to convince the install wizard that the static directory was actually there. Now, this could be a quirk of the way my hosting is set up, or something, but the fact remains that I couldn’t use the install wizard. I had to manually edit the config file with the relevant values. (Since I had my MT 3 config file this wasn’t hard, but I wouldn’t really want to do it as a novice.)

So, having filled in those details, I got myself in to the system. It created a user for me and a test post and comment. It did not publish the test post and comment though, so at that point there was still no blog to look at. Not particularly user-friendly. I had to hit the publish button myself and build all the files before I could see a working blog, set up in the default style. So, I thought – next step – change the look and feel. I checked out the new style browser functionality, kinda similar to WordPress themes, except there is no functionality exposed within the program to edit the theme itself, you can only edit site templates. Quite why the ability to edit theme styles within the movable type interface is not present escapes me. Unfortunately, given the lack of documentation due to how new the product is, it wasn’t even obvious how you make your own theme. There’s no “create new theme” option or anything like that. I eventually clued in on how the directory structure worked, and found a “themes” area in the mt-static directory that had a few sub directories with names matching the themes. Copying one of those caused a theme to appear twice in the theme browser, and, after editing some comments within the screen.css file of the copied theme, I managed to create my own “theme”. Of course, that means that all the CSS editing for the theme itself takes place outside of MT, unless you fudge it by creating some sort of linked template to the screen.css. Not a big deal, but hardly seemless.

After setting up the theme (and during, to see changes) I published various bits of the site. Wow that takes a while. There are a lot more archive types than I was used to in earlier versions, but I still found myself waiting a while for a full rebuild. Of course, the benefit is that your end-users can then browse the static pages immediately.

Unfortunately, editing the templates is not as pleasant an experience as it should be, either.

Firstly, I had to turn off the syntax-highlighting in the windows. It broke the page rendering in IE7, was very slow indeed, broke copy and paste, and basically wasn’t worth it. At least that change stuck though. Unfortunately, what I couldn’t solve was the entirely random auto-saves, which seem to occasionally interfere with manual saves and cause the loss of half the edited templates. Quite a few times I was faced with an “error” message telling me that my recently saved template was incomplete. Yes, it was, because half of it that was there a second ago had vanished. Pretty sure it’s a save-based bug, due to autosaves taking place right after you manually click the save button, but pretty annoying none the less. Ironically, I didn’t actually lose anything due to this, because it had, neatly “autosaved” the undamaged data beforehand. Pretty annoying though.

On the good side of things, the templates as supplied are much more modular and logical than in previous versions, and the new widget system works pretty well. There’s a good drag and drop system for shifting widgets or code chunks around. It did take me a while to figure out how to get a conditional element to work based on category name, but I think it may have been easier to achieve with more documentation. As it was, it seems that certain MT tags that you can use in, say, a category archive, lose context when you try to use them in a module, even if that module is being ran within the category archive. (That complicated what should have been a trivial task). Overall though the modular approach reduces the amount of repeated code in the templates and keeps things easier.

Lastly, the default editor is a rich-text window. This is as you might expect. However, it seems that it’s a very literal WYSIWYG editor, as any code I entered, expecting it to format my images etc, was happily displayed verbatim as part of the entry. This may be what some people expect and desire to happen, but, personally, if I enter HTML into one of these windows, then I expect it to be treated as HTML unless I’ve put a code block around it, or similar.

I think that it’s only fair to say that the interface itself, dispite the bugs that I came across, does look and feel very modern and classy. Most of the time at least, the context menus direct you to places you want to go. (Some times I find myself wishing for another thing to be there.)

Overall, I’d say that it is an improvement on older versions, but I won’t be going back.

Edit – I noticed just as I was finishing this entry that, when you’re typing in your WordPress entries and it does an auto-save, the manual save buttons get greyed out for the duration. Maybe MT needs such a feature to avoid the corruption that I was experiencing.

Mashable has an entry comparing MovableType4 with WordPress 2.2. Fairly interesting, they draw WordPress as a winner just now but expect close competition. I used MT for quite a few years, and got on with it fine I suppose, but, having made the switch over, I think I would take a lot of convincing to go back. I find WordPress to be much more accessible, and I think that it has a degree of flexibility to it that MT lacks.

The Pages system in WP means that I can integrate things into the rest of my site much more easily than I ever could with MT, and, what’s more, if I want to use any of the blog features outside of the directly controlled pages, all I have to do is a php include to the header files, and the full WP functionality is exposed. *very* simple, plus it’s all written in PHP rather than perl so I actually have a half a chance of understanding it.

I’ll test out MT 4, because we will need to do that anyway for Laura’s site, but I most likely won’t change. I noticed in the mashable article that they mark down WP because its anti-spam solution is not built in. Kinda true, but then that adds flexibility, and the Akismet system is very easy to install as a plugin (in fact the plugin is distributed with the initial download, you just need to get the API key.) And, what’s more, it’s been a lot more effective at stopping me seeing spam than MT ever was.

So there you go. Blog wars. hah.

In other news, today marks the 25th birthday of the CD. Happy birthday CD! Gosh, where would we be without those shiny bits of metal, eh? Vista would sure fill a lot of floppy disks.

I’m having a right pain of a time attempting to get comment subscription working for my lovely readers whilst keeping in place blacklists and whatnot.

Let’s just say it would probably be easier if I understood exactly what was going on, right now it is probably easier to move over to something like WordPress [wordpress.org] where I can get plugins that actually work alongside each other instead of competing.

The Kyoto accord starts today [news.bbc.co.uk] many years after its drafting, still without the US.

It’s done! I’m now using Movabletype as my CMS for this blog. Blogger served me well for a couple of months but I think that since I have my own host and whatnot I should really run my own system off it and save BloggerBandwidth. It also means that I’m only dependent on my one hosting provider to keep the site up and running. Ra. If you notice any bugs please do let me know, as no doubt there will be some. You can now leave comments with the comments link, as well as in my forums.

In my news today, I have taken back my Panasonic video, which was recording things in incredibly poor quality, and got it replaced with a new Sony one. Hopefully the Sony will record things decently, even though it’s more expensive and doesn’t have the SVHS features of the Panasonic. I imagine I just got a duff model from the shop before, but I don’t like getting replacements of things that have gone wrong, I’d rather have something new. Sony just seems to make the best electronic things anyway.