movabletype 4 beta1 – it’s not all it’s cracked up to be

Today I tried the beta1 of movabletype4 and I must tell you that I don’t really like it as the whole administrational panel is written in perl and passed through the common gateway interface instead of the more performant fast cgi which perl supports very well, too.

I installed the beta1 on my shared hosting account and after setting the appropriate rights for all the scripts the installation procedure was very easy to follow and I was really attracted but then it kicked me into my back.

After the setup some script logs you into the administration panel and you can create “blogs” and it has multiuser abilities, so you just create some blog and don’t forget to set the appropriate rights. Otherwise you get an error “500$B!m(B. Then you realise that whenever you make a change you need to “rebuild” your blog, which means that this movabletype blog software creates static html files with your entries in the specified folder. At first I thought it’s stupid to generate static html files whenever I make a change, but then I realized the increased performance because no script is executed anymore. Just plain html. When someone is writing a comment to one of your entries in your blog a slow perlscript (through cgi) is executed still.

So I got attracted to the fact that my “next” and “new” blog will load much faster than my wordpress blog that’s slow sometimes because the mysql-database host of my shared hosting provider lacks speed.

But guess, I am still with wordpress because too many things in movabletype bug me.

The template system of movabletype e.g. is very clumsy and I wasn’t able to transform some minimalistic wordpress template. The administration panel of movabletype is confusing sometimes and you will wonder why you are not able to click on some items in the menu under certain circumstances. This administration panel shows menu entries depending on the area you are just “in”, but hell it’s not showing you where you are. E.g. when you configure some plugin and you want to manage the entries of your blog you have the menu entry but it’s greyed out, so you need to click first on “Admin”->”Blogs”->”Your Blog” before you can click on that menu entry.

So usability needs much improvement. When I started with wordpress I just began to write blog entries in minutes.

There are many other things to mention: If you want to delete a blog e.g., you cannot :). You get some perl error message (beta1, keep that in mind).

The builtin tag system works in the administration panel, not on your blog. Whenever someone clicks on some tag he gets an error message from perl.

And combined with the bad template system I just gave up after about 3 hours of playing with movabletype4 beta1.

I know that movabletype is a blog software that dates back to many successful years but imho the step forward or backward to the GPL and opensource community could be a sign that the codebase of movable type is not that solid as expected which could mean in return that sixapart, the company behind movabletype, is not willing to spend a lot of time to manage the old perl codebase in the future anymore. This could result into a movabletype’s codebase managed by the opensource community and sixapart offering “services” for the resulting “product”.

I just told you my humble opinion and please don’t take it too seriously :). I’m just a bit angry as I’ve wasted too much time for nothing.

Have a nice weekend,
avarus.

Comment by Anil Dash
Thanks for the detailed feedback, and I’m sorry your experience wasn’t better. This is a real (meaning, very rough in spots, every early in the development process) beta, so I think that’s the core of a lot of the issues you’ve had that are frustrating.

First, we’ve done a lot of work to make sure MT *does* support FastCGI, and in fact that’s one of our big recommendations for people installing MT. However, we definitely haven’t documented that well enough yet, and not everybody’s web host supports FastCGI, so we’re working ont hat.

I think the templating system is just a different idea than what you may be used to. Put simply, we’re optimized for people to be able to create their entire layout as a mockup in HTML (or XML or whatever) and then place MT template tags in the appropriate places in the design. So, that’s a lot different than if you’re used to calling a programming routine in order to build your page.

If you can articulate what felt “clumsy” about this different approach, I’d love to write up a guide that explains the difference in concepts and what the relative strengths and weaknesses are.

And yeah, the UI was one of the last parts to make it into this first beta, so some of the ways to find your place and know where you are are really awkward. We’ll be fixing that.

Finally $B!=(B we’re making immense investments in the MT code base. The GPL is *hardly* a step backwards $B!=(B it’s a reflection of the fact that people want to be able to contribute, and we want them to. We run the largest open source blogging community in the world, so we have a great idea exactly how valuable those kinds of contributions can be, and one great way to contribute is with the kind of feedback you’ve given us. So, thanks!

Comment by Andreas Schipplock
As of december 4th 2007 I still cannot find the opensource version of MT online. Too bad :(. I would be one of those guys being interested in fixing bugs and writing addons for MT…since it’s “closed” source there is no reason to do so.