Monkeytreats

Movable Type vs. WordPress vs. Typo, Part 1

In preparation for the new Monkeytreats, I went through a surprisingly long process in evaluating what platform to build it on. I say “surprisingly” because this is just my dinking-around-for-fun side project. At the outset, I assumed I’d just pick something, install it, whip something up and get going. There’s a bunch of experimental project work that I want to do in several different development frameworks, so I figured I should just get the blog up fast, so I could get on with real coding.

So I started out with Movable Type, because that’s what we’re intending on migrating to at my day job. We’ve been over it a bit, and it’s a pretty robust platform. The killer feature for us is that you can create a new blog directly through the admin interface. With our current WordPress blogs, every time we need a new one (which happens reasonably often, and is always high-urgency), we have to go beg the overworked sysadmins to do a whole new WordPress install. This can take months—during which we have an angry partner screaming at us, which makes the months feel long indeed.

That’s not a feature I particularly need for my blog, since I have control of the server, but I figured, hey, it’s a good piece of software, I should get more familiar with it anyway, I’ll just go ahead and use it.

Then I found out that their installation guide is a PDF. Irritating, but whatever.

Then I tried to get CGI working with lighttpd. Lighty’s README’s have a bunch of helpful links to documentation that seems perfect for whatever problem you’re dealing with. However, all of those links go to nonexistent documents, and you’re stuck digging through their crappy wiki. No love to be found.

Clearly, this wasn’t a problem with Movable Type, it was with the non-standard web server I was trying to run it on. Nonetheless…I started thinking about how I was wrestling with CGI configuration, and how that just felt very 1998. Perl’s a fine language, too, but I really don’t want to spend time trying to read someone else’s Perl, and I was going to end up doing that if I needed to modify the system at all.

I decided the best thing to do would be to go dig into their template system and see what it looked like…at first I couldn’t find them, but then I did, and they seemed reasonably straightforward, although there were a bunch of files to meddle with if I wanted to do a full site repaint.

Then I thought about how Movable Type regenerates the whole site as static pages every time you publish. That’s a legitimate architectural decision, and makes scaling really straightforward…but my developer soul recoils, thinking “static pages…eew.” What if I want to read in other people’s feeds? What if I want to do anything that’s dynamic on a per-request basis, as opposed to on a per-publish basis?

That was the end of my experimentation with Movable Type.