On my drive home yesterday afternoon I called up BlogTalkRadio’s Cinch service and recorded some thoughts on my early experiences with Movable Type, which I’m looking at while researching some stuff for DiSo. Topics covered:
- installing MT on OS X
- general UI
- blog menus v. system menus
- extending Movable Type
Without a doubt, getting Perl and MySQL to play nicely on OS X (Leopard, in my case) is a bear. I spent countless hours on that one! Otherwise, good comments on MT. I look forward to seeing what you do with the beginner's developer guide.
Steve, thanks for your comments and insights of your experience thus far. We're listening and many of your desires are our goals.
Because I'm more intimate with the design and implementation of the MT navigation, I wanted to point out one major difference between WP and MT. Movable Type supports multiple blogs in one installation and thus there is a need for settings at a system level as well as at the blog level... thus the navigation is a bit more complex.
Have the best of both worlds (kinda): http://mt-hacks.com/20080212-wordpress-interface-for-movable-type.html
Looking forward to your newbie guide. =)
Thanks again.
Steve, I'd also like to invite you to join Pronet: http://www.sixapart.com/pronet/login
PHP5 OOP FIW! I'm just starting to use that in the recent months on standalone, may start to migrate the way I work more that way in WP too (though you're right, WP isn't written that way itself, probably because of PHP4 compat issues).
Eran really floored me at SGFOO with how flippantly I've treated OOP in the past, and I'm really trying to re-evaluate that.
Thanks for posting this. As a longtime Movable Type developer, I found your comments very fair and insightful.
The funny thing is, as soon as you mentioned installation issues and that you were trying to install MT on your own box, I knew it would ultimately come down to something about DBD::mysql. It's a nearly universal source of hair-tearing when trying to get MT to run locally, and I don't think Six Apart can do anything about it short of moving away from DBI altogether. Fortunately, this is one issue that affects developers but not the average user, who will most likely be installing MT on a web host that already has the required modules.
Regarding OOP, I think that the further you get into MT development, the clearer the advantages of its robust architecture become. So, I hope you stick with it!