And I should upgrade…why?
Well, the long-awaited news about SixApart’s powerful, widely used publishing platform MovableType, is finally here. The consensus on the blogs (here’s an informed post) seems to be that most people are mad that it won’t be free anymore. Six Apart is not exactly kissing babies in the weblogging community by starting to charge for a well-loved product that’s always been free.
Here are the major changes as I understand them:
-Removal of support for non-paying users
-Limiting number of blogs (3) and users per installation (1) for free licenses
-Prices starting at $70 for supported licenses
-No unlimited-author, unlimited-blog licenses anymore
-An increased focus on encouraging developers (including a $20,000 contest)
-A new openness to working with hosting providers
My prediction? This will mean that MT gets dropped by the open source community in favor of tools that:
-Are not based on Perl
-Are faster
-Do not require rebuilding (which I don’t think is so bad - after all, it makes your pages a lot more visible than those dreaded ?blahblah pages that come from PHP-output tools)
The other possibility is that 2.661 will be the final product, and that no one will ever upgrade again. There’s really nothing wrong with it, so I don’t see why upgrading will be relevant before the next big thing comes along and wipes MT off the radar. There is really nothing preventing better tools from being developed with near-identical features, and I’m hearing about more and more people jumping platforms. I think I’ll stick with 2.661 until something big happens to make me want to change.
Justin-
I’m sure in the next year or two a new tool will come onto the market that will blow MT away. Maybe something Java-based?
Java? It’s remotely possible…
I hope you’re right, Aaron. That’s certainly something I’d like to see happen.
I suspect that Wordpress will get a lot more users as a result of this.
I think so too. The problem, as I understand Wordpress, is that it does not generate HTML files, so Google can’t index it. That’s what I love about MovableType - it gets great results on Google. I’ll be interested to see what develops to remedy this with dynamic CMSs.
I’m looking seriously at Wrodpress also but will try to confirm the HTML generation issue.
I looked at little at the documentation today, and it looks like there’s a way to do it, though it doesn’t look easy. I think I’ll stick with MT2.661 until that becomes impossible or less desirable than other available options.
I thought Google could index generated pages because it just followed the links and read whatever content came back. Is this right anyone?
Status update: I’ve been rethinking my ongoing site redesign for our church site, for which I was learning and planning to use MT.
But it’s been hard for me as an MT novice and CSS novice to make it fit into the box I was putting it in. What I really want is a true CMS.
Last night as I was re-evaluating CMS’s I stumbled across a packaging that somebody’s doing of PostNuke. It’s called “Church Website In A Box”, which is just PostNuke and several commonly used additional modules. It can be found here and I’m evaluating it now. It appears to offer all the functionality I’ve been looking for, but I have to go learn how the site is actually built, how to modify it, how to modify the themes, etc.
Oh, I forgot one more thing. WordPress doesn’t internally support multiple blogs. You can do it, through multiple installation locations and a hack to your mysql db, but it’s going to be a while before a version of WP which does this inherently is a while out.
Yeah, that is an issue in some circumstances. It’s not like installing several copies of MT, though; it really does only take 5 minutes, and the SQL thing really isn’t a hack; you just have to change two characters in the config.php file, and it gives you instructions on how to do it. Also, there’s only one template to update, which is pretty amazing, and the search features are incredible.
I’ve installed PostNuke before (actually, I have it installed now) and I have to say it’s a lot more complicated that anyone needs. Unless you have:
1) A large number of people adding content
2) A large number of events going on
3) A large amount of content that can’t all fit on the front page
you probably don’t want to mess with anything that complicated. Not trying to shut you down, here, but I did all that and no one ever used it, so it was just a learning experience for me.