I’m a late entrant into the world of practical employment, and however fun playing Diablo II is, it does not pay the bills…at least, not in this country. So I am now productively employed at Caroline Collective (under the wonderful Erica O’Grady), a place brimming with pugs and cupcakes. Alright, there’s only one pug — and he’s absolutely adorable — but sometimes, the eyes play tricks…
I thought, at first, that a design job would entail some sort of formulaic precision on my part — sketches, wireframes, prototypes, communication with wolves, and late-light voodoo rituals. I have stolen no souls yet, nor have I followed my lupine brethren into the night, but I have been tremendously productive. The White Stripes and a laptop will do that to you. In the past few weeks, I’ve designed two sites, exported two others into Wordpress, and I’m currently procrastinating on finishing a third (it’ll be done in a few days, Matthew!) because I don’t know whether the best colors to use on a site about Houston are bright blue and green. It’s a real pity that there are no known hexadecimal equivalents for “Smog” and “Metro Bus” — although there are plenty of interpretations.
Working with Sandbox
I’ve always used Sandbox for WordPress themes because the templates are minimalistic enough that I can pretty much remove everything except the template tags and still end up with a functional site. I’ve only ever run into problems working with the sidebar. On the sidebar, I always have to edit out the wrapper <ul> and <li> tags that separate the different sections, like the archives and categories, etc. I always end up going into functions.php and removing the before_title and after_title snippets. Still, I’m sure that from a semantic standpoint, the nested lists are marginally better, but I’m not exactly sure why. I could probably even save myself the trouble and just throw in a few lines of CSS. But knowing me, I’d probably just sit back and cycle through all of “Elephant” until something obvious hit me in the face.
Necessary commentary
I still say that Movable Type is the best CMS for templating, but WordPress is a million times more reliable if harder to work with. Sometimes, I’ll sign into cPanel and find out that Movable Type’s been dumping giant steaming piles of core files in its home directory, so I have to rub its nose in the mess and yell at it loudly on a biweekly basis. But one hundred extra megabytes of useless core files on a hosting plan as “small” as mine is no laughing matter. I say useless because, although core files are snapshots of the server at the time of an error and can help to pinpoint exactly what went wrong, I can’t open them or access them with anything. Each core file has an extension composed of random numbers, and no two are alike. There is no directory of core extensions, and there are no entries in my error logs. At face value, there is nothing wrong with my installation. But I know that just a foot below its bubbling exterior is a volcano ready to destroy my island paradise and tempt archaeologists for years in the future to dig up the remains of my strawberry cheesecake ice cream and say, “Here was a civilized race.”
Although I realize that many of you believe that Movable Type is utter crap and that WordPress is the King of King, Lord of Lords, and the Greatest! Grandest! Polliwog of them all, and I don’t help my case any with all of my complaints against the script, I believe that Movable Type is actually the better (in terms of usability) program. WordPress, however, has far better support because of its large following and the fact that it was open source long before Movable Type waddled back to the idea.
The support sites that develop around a CMS are vital to the success of the script itself. If a script requires you to know, intimately, a bizarre programming language and practically write certain basic functions from the ground up, odds are that its three users will be comprised of a zealous programmer, a lay genius, and an ostrich, who, for lack of a better hobby, was knee-deep in binary detritus. Movable Type has grown tremendously since the release of version 4.0, but its support structure still needs work. The best help costs money, and while a paid license is probably a pretty good investment, the best free options do not consistently offer the same quality.
The official documentation is actually quite good — even if it is rather basic. My one complaint with its organization is that the content is separated between three roles: the author, the designer, and the administrator. And if all three of these are one person, namely me, said person has to rummage around between the three categories to find the relevant information.
If the documentation doesn’t help, the primary support/community site is MovableType.org. I’ve never treated this site very well (we have a difficult relationship) because the hub of the site, the forum, is so ill-frequented by people who have the sort of expertise with Movable Type — Six Apart employees, maybe? — that would be beneficial to everyone who asks for help but never gets it. I can’t count the number of posts without replies that I see on the site, and I just wonder how many users that is actually costing Six Apart. Or how many paid licenses. If you’re wondering why WordPress has so much of market in its pocket, this is probably the biggest reason.
The best sites for Movable Type resources/help
I’ve found the following (especially Learning Movable Type) to be very helpful on my long and arduous journey. Some of these sites haven’t updated in almost a year, others in a few months, but since certain errors in Movable Type (CGI or Perl related) are often constant across generations of the script, the archived entries should prove invaluable:
So here I am, writing a post that will, thanks to weeks of failed attempts (and half an hour of tinkering in the end), appear on the front page of my site, trying to fix the dashboard, and coercing Sandy to give up her rolly-chair for the betterment of all free peoples. It’s a hard life, but in the end the perks (not having to fiddle with The Loop or ask Jake or Joey for help every few minutes) win out.
Everyone’s favorite greyhound — by which I mean my favorite, naturally — has left the gates and is now riding a unicorn to victory, because by the glory of Thor, Movable Type 4.0 is finally out of beta. This means that now, Movable Type’s source code is open-source — which is great for plugin developers (Movable Type will finally have the potential for a large user-base like WordPress) — and to celebrate, not only is there a new admin panel, but Movable Type now has a shiny new homepage. I like how it’s far easier to download Movable Type now, instead of having to go through Six Apart and trying to find the one version you wanted. Now, the default is a free plan; this should help to ease some new users’ fears!
Movable Type’s documentation is now more organized and structured. It’s far than before, I feel, although I wish that documentation still existed for older versions of Movable Type (some can be found on Six Apart’s site). The template tag reference is now sorted alphabetically — while this makes tags easier to look up, it wouldn’t help someone understand exactly how tags are related (the old categorized template tags did that well).
Setup
The download files are 4.1-4.9 MB in size, compared with only about 1 MB for a WordPress download, but Movable Type hasn’t exactly professed to being lightweight. I’m worried that most of the extra weight is dealing with the new cosmetic changes, but since I don’t have a copy of Movable Type 3.35 anymore, I can’t really check the file-size against that.
Installation was a breeze, since Movable Type has an installation wizard now (thank god). I set up a database, typed in some details, user names and the like, and it took about a minute to install, and when you think about it, a one-minute installation really isn’t bad. There’s some silliness about notification e-mails that you can actually skip — I’m sure you can set that up within Movable Type itself.
Usage
There are some new things in 4.0 that I thought were worth mentioning:
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