Resurrection

This post was nearly entitled: MT blows goats.

Over the weekend I started rebuilding a postcard site I had once. At one point, after being a Yahoo! pick of the day, being dugg and making the print version of a nationally distributed newspaper this site was getting pretty heavily hit.

Built on a modified (read as: hacked all to hell) version of Movable Type and a not very secure old Sendcard script, it wasn’t exactly stable. While I have the data in a variety of formats exporting it in a useful way proved a little cumbersome so I decided to recreate the site from scratch using current versions of MT and Sendcard.

I started with a clean install of MT4.

Wowsers. It sure is pretty and chock full o’ fancy AJAXian goodness. The template system is new and ‘improved’ with the goal of separating the various components of a site into manageable and reusable chunks. Quite a few of them actually, a few too many for this guy. I find it absurd that I have to root through three levels of nested template menus to make a trivial change to a sidebar and, in all honesty, after reading the docs and fiddling with the site I still haven’t a clue what half of the templates do and the last thing I need is another ‘widget’.

Oddly, the one thing I couldn’t edit from my browser was the stylesheet. The CSS is kept in a template directory and, it would seem, has to be edited outside the MT application. Sure, there plenty of workarounds but why should I have to jump through hoops to change a font size? An even bigger problem was the new asset management system. It used to be that you could open a previously uploaded image and view/modify the [X]HTML, change captions and alt text and recreate the thumbnail. Now all you get is the ability to edit the ‘tags’. Tags I neither want nor need in the first place.

I remember how happy I was reading that MT had been open sourced. After using it for a bit I can see why — this beastie has gotten so large and complex that it is now beyond the reach of the casual designer/hobbyist. While I wish SixApart the best the reality is that Movable Type is no longer suitable for the individual who just wants a weblog and maybe a photo gallery.

As nice as it is to see a once loved tool move into newsrooms and the corporate big time, I am not about to devote my limited time and resources to learning a friggin’ operating system.