Time to recant: I’m back with MT after a brief — and totally dissatisfying — flirtation with WordPress, and two more I’d missed earlier: B2Evolution and Serendipity. Along the way, I also checked out ExpressionEngine.  

So why the change of heart?

The most important factor was the documentation. Of all the blogging apps, MT is easily the best documented. True, there are some small holes even there, and there’s stuff that isn’t in the documentation but, for the most part, it’s logical, well-structured and an excellent starting point. The Open Source apps pretty much leave it to you to figure out. Just having to hunt through all the Wikis and the miserable docs to find what you want is just too mind-numbing.

Let’s be clear: I don’t mind paying for a product that gives me what I want and is accompanied by genuine support. The MT support system is excellent. ExpressionEngine, which is as expensive, if not more so, doesn’t have this. Second, the app should be flexible and scalable, something that can run anything from a simple blog to complex content management system — without requiring you to be a rocket scientist. MT does this, too.

But what is truly determinative is that of all the blogging apps, MT is the only one that has a really full and wide spectrum of plugins and hacks. In this department, the others are trying to catch up, and while they do, more and more are being added to MT.

Plugins

It can’t be accident that MT has a genuinely comprehensive centralized plug-in repository. EE has one, too, but the listing just doesn’t compare.

I use a whole bunch of plug-ins on the sites I run with MT. Presently, I’ve got at least seven sites on MT, using one version or the other and all of them use plugins. Some of the plugins have become essentials; others are nice-to-have. I’m just not going to switch to another app and then wait and wait and wait for one of my essentials/nice-to-haves to finally show up; and when they do I probably won’t even know for months.

The essentials

Bookqueue Too and MTAmazon : Like its predecessor, Bookqueue (still available), BQToo allows you to list a whole bunch of books and now, in its latest avatar other products. Information about these products is pulled from Amazon.com, which is why you need the MTAmazon thing, too. With MTAmazon you can do a whole bunch of other stuff, too, like pull product details, customer reviews, filter items and more. Both are crucial to my Bibliophage site.

Related Entries: I use this all the time as a way of getting the “more like this” entries.

Filter Categories: handy-dandy for content placement. You want one type/category of posts in a particular spot? No problem, use this.

Paginate: splits a page niftily into sections by number of paragraphs, words or wherever you like with a pre-defined text. You can also use it to split an index page (never felt the need for that, though). WP doesn’t have this, or at least not easily. There’s a plug in or hack to let you split an index page into several pages, but nothing this cool.

IfEmpty: This is really useful to test an if-then-else situation for any tag. I use it to trigger a type of formatting depending on whether I have text in the “more” field or not.

Nice To Have

RelatedEntriesbyKeywords: Another useful way of linking entries.

KeyValues and KeywordVariable: Allow you to use variables in the keywords field. I use these for on bibliophage.net for generating links to Amazon by ASIN/ISBN and pull images of the books and movie titles.

BlogCopyright: Auto-generates copyright tag lines in the footer.

MTKeyword: Really cool — generates a meta-tag of keywords for the page. What a shame the search engines don’t much use keywords any more. Perhaps one day they’ll go back to it. Note that the link on the MT Plugins site leads to a 404. The correct archive page is here.

Installation, configuration and templates

Anyone who tells you that MT is a bitch to install is talking rot. I go through MT installation in 5 or 10 minutes, seamlessly, and if there’s an error, there’s a documented solution for it. No need to hunt around endlessly for an answer. The configuration is intuitive, logical and neat. Some of the others are truly bizarre and impossible to understand. For all that Dean Allen promotes readability with his textile plugin, his TextPattern blogging app is truly a nightmare to work through; and B2Evolution and Expression Engine aren’t very much better.

As far as I know, only MT gives you, right out of the box, different templates for different archives. The standard ones (for V3) are here. Certainly WP expects a series of hacks for this and I just couldn’t figure out the others. Here it’s clean, it’s neat and it’s right there for you to tinker with — different templates for index, main archives, category, individual, date-based, the works.

Also, MT has a built-in image file uploader and thumbnailer. At least two of the others don’t.

Styles, too, are no problem. For a bunch of very, very sophisticated designs, check out MovableStyle.

Dynamic Pages in MT 3.x

Where WP and most of the others really scored over MT was in their dynamic publishing feature. You had to hack these to get them to spit out static pages. Now I believe (not sure why) that dynamic publishing is altogether less secure though it does save server space; and, besides, puts less load on the server since you don’t need to rebuild each time. After much mulling and even more vacillation, I finally figured that what I really want is the option to do either, and only MT allows this built-in, without a hack of any kind. It’s true that, presently, a lot of the plugins (especially MTPaginate) just don’t work with dynamic pages but that will soon be resolved — after all, this is one app that people are working on !

Arvind has a truly incredible site on MT with lots of insightful tips and hints. He also responds with disconcerting speed to any email query and he’s always spot on. He showed me a hack, for example, to pre-specify a directory for image uploads; to always have images aligned left with vspace and hspace set to 10, say so that I don’t have to rely only on CSS for this.

Free Lunch

Okay, so there’s a lot of griping about MT being paid now. But they’ve rationalized their prices and for $100 I get a top of the line, unlimited blogs and unlimited authors entitlement. There really is no such thing as a free lunch. The trade-off is that the freebie apps out there suck big time on their documentation and support; MT charges and delivers. The better test or comparison is really with ExpressionEngine — that’s paid, too, as expensive, if not more so and still doesn’t have the same quality of documentation and support. Having said that, I have to confess that EE is probably more than I need and is, arguably, a fuller content-management system (CMS). MT can double up as that, too, but that’s probably not its principal focus. I do, however, use MT to generate static pages (like “about us”, for example) and I am truly happy with a mix of both static and dynamic pages.

The MT v WP Battle

MovableType v WordPress v TextPattern face-off. Excellent analysis.

Arvind at Movalog on MT v WP

Neil Turner lays out why he’s not switching to WP.

Scripty Goddess revisits the eternal question: MT or WP?

Useful MT Links

MTHacks: All kinds of nifty doodah things to do with your MT installation.

SmartyPants : Required for those smartquotes and so on.

Michel Fortin’s page on Markdown for PHP (dynamic publishing).

Michel Fortin again, this time on smartypants for dynamic publishing/php.

Dynamic Pages and Markdown : How to get smart quotes etc working with dynamic pages.

Arvind’s Movalog page on plugins for dynamic publishing in MT (using php).

Neil Turner on how to do a smooth MT installation in minutes.

Niall Kennedy explains an undocumented (or poorly documented) but very useful MT Tag. Wonder why they missed this in the MT manual?

David Gagne : How to create a pop up “email this entry” window in MT

Dave does the Blog : good tips on dynamic pages and more.

Dave does the blog (again) : More on smartypants in dynamic publishing in MT.

D Michael Allen tweaks the MT Admin interface.

Blogging Guides

QuackTrack : Browsable blog index

Simon World : Guide to blogging

Excellatronic Communications : How to create bookmarklets