mediajunk

I've always been a fan of Movable Type. It was the one of the first blogging tools, and the most user-friendly blogging tools.

From a great start about 5 or 6 years ago, the company behind Movable Type, Six Apart, then made some errors. Notoriously, they began charging for the previously free tool. While they improved the interface and functionality over the years, these aspects still lagged way behind those of WordPress.

For example, MT's editing interface was anything but WYSIWYG. The publishing/updating process remained relatively slow and clunky. And its comment spam handling was pathetic.

For me, the most annoying aspect of MT was that it took a lot of hacking to convert it to a full CMS that my clients could use. Nevertheless, hacking MT exactly what I did for clients because, despite all these shortcomings, MT remained the most user-friendly interface. I could show clients quickly how to publish news pages to their sites, for example, without any mumbo-jumbo about "loops" or "modules" or "mambots" or "joomlets" (okay, I made that last one up).

With the recent release of MT4, some of my criticisms have been addressed. MT 4 is free for personal use and, unlike previous versions, you can download the app without registering. Upgrading from 3.x is a cinch.

The big new concept is "pages", letting you add pages to the website, in the style of your blog entries. I haven't tried this feature yet but, hopefully, it will remove a lot of the hacking work I mentioned earlier. The editor has also improved -- finally, it's WYSIWYG, and has an upload images button.

On the downside, while the interface has improved in some ways, overall I'd say that it's not as attractive as previous versions. The extensive use of light text on a black background, including in the app's header, was a bad mistake. I'll see if I can CSS that out.

The solution may lie in another feature I'm eager to try: using template tags on the MT interface itself. If I understand this correctly, this feature will allow me to customise it for clients. Again, I don't know how that will work yet, but I'll keep you posted.

Update: I take it all back. They've included a feature called "Widget Sets". Now what the hell is that?! Why confuse users with unfamiliar jargon?

Tags: cms, movable type