Movable Type vs. WordPress vs. Typo, Part 2
Jan 15
So, I abandoned Movable Type and went to check out the latest version of WordPress. It's open source, so that's great. It's PHP, so it's easy to get running with Apache and easy to hack up. On the flip side, it's PHP, so there's no MVC to speak of and you're going to be hacking it up.
It was a pretty quick thing to get up and running with WordPress, so, satisified, I turned to templating. I'd built out a site design in static HTML, and I figured I wouldn't need to do much more than cut-and-paste my HTML and CSS into the default theme and then tweak it a bit until it worked.
Unfortunately, it wasn't so straightforward. The model that WordPress uses for building up its default theme template is to include a bunch of component files into the main file. This was a really great technique at one point; it enabled a lot of code reuse. However, HTML templates are generally so simple today that it's just not worth it. You get to reuse perhaps four lines of HTML at the cost of making your page framework a bitch to work with.
I tried pasting bits of my template into the various included PHP files, but my layout blew up and I didn't have a lot of patience for wading through it, 1999 style, strewing the code with little text snippets to figure out exactly what was going where. Instead, I decided to start with a clean slate, taking a fresh copy of my HTML template and applying the various WordPress PHP tags to it, rather than the other way around. Then I realized that I was going to have to do the same thing on the single-article page, as well as maybe some others, and my enthusiasm waned.
So, just for shits, I decided to give Typo a go.