There was a moment last week when I thought that I could honestly switch to WordPress and have no problem with it, but every time I design with it, I feel like I’m cobbling something together instead of using the defined framework. It’s a little hard to tell, because sometimes you find regular PHP beside template tags. Granted, it works, and that should be all that matters. But I do love that Movable Type defines most of the things you will ever need for your site in advance. It just helps cement my choice of CMS a little more thoroughly.

There are a few things I would change, and a few of these I have definitely brought up before.

1. Features

   This one is a little nitpicky, since I have no complaints about the bulk of Movable Type’s built-in features, but did you know that Movable Type hasn’t had proper article pagination until Version 4.3 (please correct me if I’m wrong)? I’m talking a simple previous/next entries link at the bottom of the page. I racked my brain trying to find a solution to work on my poor little 4.1 installation, but all of my best efforts failed. I tried about four plugins, and none of them managed to do anything either. Which brings me to my next point:

2. Plugins

   I don’t know what happened to the developer community for Movable Type, but there’s not too many of them left. Just for comparison’s sake, WordPress has 7,965 available plugins. Movable Type has a mere 910. I’ll leave the guffawing and math to you guys. In the mean time, I might start writing my own, although this seems like a bad idea all over. Now, quantity usually doesn’t matter, and there are quite a few quality plugins on the community site, but maybe only one working version, or perhaps two, of the same sort of script. What ends up happening is that you don’t have alternatives to turn to if nothing works out. And when you really want help, the place you turn to first is the community forum:

3. Support

   I can rant and rave about this at length. Fewer users means fewer knowledgeable users, which means fewer people who have answers rather than more questions. It really keeps coming down to the size of the community. You can have all the functionality in the world built into your CMS, but if no one’s constantly surging ahead and syncing it with the latest technologies, it won’t matter at all. There’s not a great deal of dignity in being just behind the baseline.

4. External Help

   A lot of the really great sites for Movable Type help that I mentioned in one of my previous posts, like Movable Tweak, Learning Movable Type, and Movalog have either stopped updating or just don’t work. It’s always a good sign if the company that makes the product has the best support site for it, but it’s slightly more tragic when it’s the only one around. I mean, where do you go to when there’s nothing else?

Solutions

I encourage developers, programmers, and curious minds to try sparking some new life into MovableType.org. It’s a wonderful platform, and while most people aren’t comfortable with Perl/CGI — that’s it, isn’t it? PHP is more accessible? — it doesn’t look too bad. Hell, if I say I’m going to try it, it can’t be that bad.

I think a lot of you guys will get the impression that I’m just punishing myself by using MT, by wearing myself out until I just shiver and hallucinate about WordPress all day, but it’s just because I really like this system, and I hate to see it wear away. Six Apart is doing their part by creating a brand new version which, aside from the admin panel woes, and the catering towards a community site rather than a personal blog — hence the word “site” throughout. Now I think it’s my turn to chip in.

Or perhaps, this is as good as it gets.

I always expect some radical shift in scenery when we cross a state border — the tall, thin trees of Georgia and Alabama and then, suddenly, in the space it takes to get through my entire Queen: Live at Wembley DVD (yes, I own it. Yes, it’s awesome), the Mississippi River is rolling along before us. Louisiana hits us with bright lights and casinos, an overuse of the “-eaux” spelling (for example, “Geaux” instead of “Go”, which I find embarrassingly superfluous). And after that, there’s no point in paying attention anymore, because Texas is a few miles ahead, and there’s nothing to see there that I haven’t already seen.

It disappoints me though, when states just fade into other states, when you cross a border and nothing changes — nothing noticeable. After some time, you might see mountains, which I always freak out about, but the sky doesn’t change colors. Weird animals don’t start popping up behind trees and chasing your car off of their ancestral land (Tennessee has a horrible problem with badgers cropping up in housing developments and chasing off the residents — I just thought you should know). There’s often little more than a welcome center (I’m keeping track of the good and bad ones — that was aimed at you, Alabama), a cluster of fast food places and gas stations, and then I-10 stretches out again like an endless road.

But I’m back! A week in Georgia, and a few days in Dallas, and tomorrow I’ll be back in Houston, hoping for fabled snow, and getting some work done at last. In the past week, I’ve read about six hundred pages (The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets by Eva Rice, and The Gathering by Anne Enright), which makes me incredibly happy. There’s nothing better than being able to immerse yourself in a book all day, to read late into the night, and wake up dreaming about the characters. Except when they’re characters in an Irish tragedy, like The Gathering. That was an odd dream.

I’ve made a few adjustments to my test redesign, viewable here. I’m not sure how I feel about a tabbed menu. I think I’ve run that river dry, and the more I try to come back to it, the more banal it feels. They’re not even very interesting tabs. What makes them pretty at all is the fact that I threw in some rgba — which I have been using all over the place now, because it’s so versatile and easy — and, well, there you have it.

• Continue reading "You never know, it could be great" »

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.”