reflections

Ladies and Gentleman… Allow me to welcome you to the restyle of the century! My new theme - almost four weeks (part-time) in the making - brings a fresh new look to my blog.

What you’re looking at is based on the Dark Theme, which was originally designed by Wolfgang Bartelme. His design was converted to WordPress by iLEMONed, widgetized by Diego Ciconi, and then giving a graphical thrashing by yours truly!

I hope you like what I’ve done with the place - and I really look forward to your comments (positive or constructive) and feedback on what you like or dislike as far as functionality goes! Oh, and if you’re reading this via my feed then you probably have no idea what I’m talking about - so come and see the site in person!

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SixApart have finally released a new beta of their blogging and content management system Movable Type. MT 4.0 is the first major release of the software since 2004 - and comes with the interesting news that SixApart will be moving the application to a GPL open-source licence before the end of this year.

Ironically enough, up until the release of MT 3.0 many users treated the software as open-source - despite the fact that it wasn’t official. When SixApart decided to enforce the licence with the release of MT 3.0 it caused widespread outrage, and this may have been one of the things that took WordPress from obscurity to popularity.

The new version of Movable Type is radically different from previous versions though, with more than 50 new features - including an installation and upgrade wizard, more powerful templating, new bundled themes, and a redesigned user interface. It also integrates social media by offering simple ways to get photos, videos and audio into posts - and there’s a new ratings framework too. Scalability concerns have also been squashed with database caching - increasing the chances of surviving the Digg effect unscathed.

My Personal Experience

I download the new beta yesterday - but gave up after two hours of failing to get my new blog to display! I had to manually change CGI permissions in the root directory, set up the required MySQL database, and figure out where Sendmail was located on my server - before I could even get into the Control Panel!

The admin stuff does looks great though - with an excellent Dashboard and drop-down menu navigation. Given how much has obviously been ‘borrowed’ from WordPress though, it’s a shame it doesn’t even come close in terms of intuitiveness! It took me ages to figure out how to do anything - which might not be a problem if you’re totally green to blogging!

I’m not stupid when it comes to the Internet; I develop in PHP myself, and I’ve been using pre-written scripts and database applications for at least 8 years. I also followed the Getting Started Guide to the letter - so it’s not like I’d done something wrong! Perhaps WordPress has just made me lazy, with it all being so simple…

Special technical note: please DO NOT install MT on to the same domain as your WP blog (even if it’s in a sub-directory). It puts an index.html file into the root of the domain, which typically takes precedence over the default index.php required for WordPress. What you end up with is the MT blog coming up instead of the WP one, if you view it from the root of your domain (i.e. http://paulenderson.com). Feel free to comment if you need more on this, or if you’ve screwed up your blog like I did!

Conclusion?

Moveable Type 4.0 is definitely a step in the right direction - and it’s heart-warming to see SixApart taking the GPL route. But they’re not going to suceed in drawing people away from WordPress until they’ve seriously improved their backend. Perhaps I’ll give it another go once it’s out of beta though…

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No proper post today, as I’m going to be tearing my hair out upgrading to WordPress 2.2 for the next eight hours… Well probably - the truth is that I’m not really sure how hard it’s going to be, so if I get it done in less than 3 hours then I’ll write something more interesting than this!

Anyone else upgrading today? Am I the only person who’s template includes PHP modifications, or is anyone else sweating it too?

I was seriously toying with the idea of moving to ExpressionEngine, given how flexible it seems in comparison to WP. I mean, people like Veerle make it look incredible - although I suspect that’s due to Veerle’s design skills and not the blogging platform she’s chosen! But then I found out yesterday that one of my favourite blog designs is actually based on WP, and not on EE as I had thought! Maybe I’ll stick with the boys from the Press for a little longer!

By the way, if you visit this domain tomorrow and get a 404, then it’s quite likely that I’ve screwed it right up - just so you know! If you want something to read while you’re waiting for me to fix it, then you could check out this very, very, very, very long post by Miss Lisa…

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Five days ago I set up this blog with Dean J Robinson’s fantastic Redoable Wordpress Theme. I knew I was going to end up restyling it a little - Dean’s theme is incredibly popular, and I didn’t want my blog to look like loads of others!

So, the refresh is now done - and I’m quite happy with the results! I’d like to build my own original theme from the ground up eventually, but until I get time to do that I’m happy to base my site on one of the best!

What do you think then? Does anyone else give a damn about it apart from me?!

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