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:

• Movable Tweak
• Learning Movable Type
• Movalog
• Code documentation (if you’re the programmy type)
• A rundown of the various templates/styles that come with Movable Type

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.