Comments on: Movable Type 3.2 Impressions

By: Searching Movable Type with PHP • Blog Archive • Joe’s Apt.

Searching Movable Type with PHP • Blog Archive • Joe’s Apt. — Mon, 12 May 2008 17:59:51 +0000

[...] Mike Davidson asked for it: [...]

By: Collin

Collin — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

There is still a big down side to MT that you havn’t mentioned. The price! I would definitely have to go with WordPress just for the cost. Although neither one is a good solution for me since the only linux server I have is the one under my desk double as a foot rest right now.

Mike, the only thing I noticed that bothered me about your blog is that the “Notify me” feature will blow up my Gmail with 2 notices for each post it seems. And even more irritating, I am not sure that the HTML emails are being sent out correctly because I get screwey ugly links that I can’t click on. Maye the new version solves that.

I havn’t found a good solution that will run off ASP yet (probably because I havn’t had time to build it) so I have been using Blogger which was pretty hard to customize the template and has about 200 other things that bother me.

By: Collin

Collin — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

P.S. The rest of your blog is awesome. I aspire to be like Mike. :-)

By: Faruk Ateş

Faruk Ateş — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Christ Mike, an hour is being lenient, really. All that one would need is the database model and half an hour, maybe 45 minutes for fine-tuning it.

And that would be a basic search through the database with returning output.

It’ll probably take (me) longer to set up an installation of MT itself than to add this PHP-search thing, ironically enough…

By: Gabriel Mihalache

Gabriel Mihalache — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I love MT’s flexibility in matters of templating. WP is a nightmare, compared. I just wish people would stop paying lip-service to WP, or even using it because, it’s open source.

By: Marco

Marco — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I'm not really impressed with MT to be honest. MT is a commercial weblog application. If an application costs money I expect it to be significantly better than freely available alternatives. However it's really not better than wordpress or Pivot (the one I'm using myself) just to list two examples.I'm not saying MT sucks or attempting to bash it here, please don't interpret my comment as such, but I don't see any added value that makes me want to dump the free alternative, shell out some cash and go MT.Just my 5 cents of course.p.s.: I know it's free if you blog alone but on several of my sites I'm not.

By: Kyle

Kyle — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I love MT’s flexibility in matters of templating. WP is a nightmare, compared. I just wish people would stop paying lip-service to WP, or even using it because, it’s open source.

Quite frankly, that’s ignorant. I cannot comment on MT, but WP has by far the best templating system I’ve seen to date. It’s an absolute beauty in terms of balancing ease-of-use while hiding the more powerful features for power-users.

I still don’t understand why any blogging software I’ve used has yet to produce a really good search (Yes, that includes WP, Typo and TxP). All of them seem to be more than happy with a basic search that’ll do the bare minimum. I say we push for more advanced search options. It’s about time already.

P.S. I totally agree with you about staging-urls. I don’t know why MT or WP doesn’t have this built-in yet. Although, I made my own hack for WP that allows me to do it… but it’s still not as clean as it could be.

By: Nathan Smith

Nathan Smith — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Honestly, I tend to think of Movable Type as an outdated system. Sure, many high-profile sites, such as this one, SimpleBits, and Stopdesign run on MT. But I think that most of these guys would agree that if they were to start anew, MT would not be the CMS of choice.

While WordPress is #2 in my book, my qualms with MT are the “Rebuilding” of sites, and the lack of licensing freedom in having multiple authors. As far as rebuilding goes, I’ve sometimes received updated articles in my Bloglines long before they appeared on a site, due to an author forgetting to rebuild the site after posting something.

All that being said, I’m absolutely in love with Textpattern. The interface is simple, and if there’s a feature lacking, there’s a (hyper)active community of plugin-writers out there. Especially handy is the new one out by Rob Sable which allows you to backup your entire MySQL database right from the TXP interface, without having to even touch phpMyAdmin.

But, the point of this comment is not to exhault any CMS over another, simply to show my opinion. To each his own, and I’m glad Mike keeps this blog, regarless of the system running it behind the scenes. Keep up the great writing, as it’s been a great inspiration to me, and even helped further my career.

By: Philip

Philip — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I must agree with Faruk. I’d say 30-45 min tops for your normal PHP/MySQL programmer. For the Wolf I’d expect 15 min, and that includes the fine tuning.
Am I offering? Ha, of course not! Opinionists never do unforunatly…

By: Faruk Ateş

Faruk Ateş — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Re: philip’s comment:

Mike, if you e-mail me the database layout of MT 3.2 I can cook something up for you, no sweat.

By: Sujay

Sujay — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve fallen in love with the new MT 3.2 since it got released. It’s added all the features I’ve been clamoring for, except for one. Exporting entire weblogs (templates, settings, etc.).I wholly agree about the search problem.

By: Jason Santa Maria

Jason Santa Maria — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Right on Mike. And how about some Yearly archive templates and tags?

By: Jason Santa Maria

Jason Santa Maria — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

And what about some documentation on those new tags like basename, or ones that will potentially break the way your site works like the revised comments tags. I am really digging the new update too, but man, at least document the new features (even quick descriptions that mention what the syntax or usage of the tags look like).

By: Jay

Jay — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Given the look of the search output beforehand, it would easily take less than an hour to produce a boolean search function for the blog that users can use to search for whatever they wish. The trouble is not all servers like to enable boolean search by default and therefore most people stick to the default option because its most widely used..

Personally I love wordpress and its templating system, if only forum packages could have such simple and easy to use templating systems…

By: Kevin Hale

Kevin Hale — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I worked out a better movable type search that's php/mysql based a year or so ago. You can see it in play over at my personal site here:http://depository.unfoldedorigami.com/cupboard/Just start typing and you'll see the search results "calculates" the probability that the results are what you're looking for based on a ranking system. The live searching is your typical script from around the web, but I post up the scripts for the search here:http://depository.unfoldedorigami.com/php/bettersearch.phpxHere's the MT forum post I put in last fall:http://www.movabletype.org/support/index.php?s=4605aaff3523060725a5eeb041ef3d5b&act=ST&f=14&t=45349&hl=Anyway, it could use some improvements now that I'm going through it. It'll make a good Particletree tutorial and so I'll try to get one up in a week or so.