Just a quickie. Movable Type is now open source (under GPL), so I’m testing it out.
Like Wordpress, it’s very easy to install. Provided you have the database (MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQLite), all you have to do is
$ wget http://www.movabletype.org/opensource/nightlies/MTOS-4.1-en-boomer-r1116-20071214.tar.gz
$ tar xzvf MTOS-4.1-en-boomer-r1116-20071214.tar.gz
$ mv MTOS-4.1-en-boomer-r1116-20071214/* .
Then browse to http://domain.name/path/to/your/MT/install, and follow the prompts. Nightly builds are available, but if you want the bleeding edge, you can grab it through SVN (there’s an extra make me step, though).
The interface is intuitive, with the dashboard having that warm AJAXy feel, but it was a little too slow for my taste. Applying new styles (or “themes”, in Wordpress parlance) is as easy as select and apply, but adding widgets is counter-intuitive: you’d have to edit the style manually to add the widget code snippet.
The mix of Perl and PHP code is a bit weird for me as well — heck, I’m a purist: give me PHP or Perl, but not both. 
There’s also the lack of specifying table prefixes for the database. I use a single database instance for my side projects, and I’m used to just adding prefixes to distinguish the apps, but apparently (from what I have read from the docs so far), there’s no way to configure that in MT.
Other than that, it’s a cool new toy. There’s no immediate plan of moving over to MT, but it’s well worth checking it out.
Using the following modules in my Drupal CMS implementation:
- Archive
- Attachment
- BasicEvent
- Event
- Excerpt
- Feedback
- Filemanager
- Flexinode
- Forward
- Help
- Image
- Img_assist
- Menu
- Node
- Nodewords
- Notify
- Page
- Path
- Pathauto
- Print
- RSVP
- Search
- Service_links
- Similar
- Simplenews
- Sitemenu
- Taxonomy
- Taxonomy_access
- TinyMCE
- WatchdogNotify
Up next:
- Themeing the front_page. I’ve created a PHP snippet to list and beautify recent news items.
- Clean up the code. The HTML source is a mess! Will have to dig deeper into that.
- Integrate with Gallery (there’s a Drupal module for this) and MediaWiki (if possible). I wil be needing these apps if I want to make my life easier.
- Migrate from the old CMS. Now this will be a pain. Would have to do this manually as the tables are way, way different. Ugh!
I’m up to my nostrils in work. My desktop is a freakin’ mess, with windows opened all over the place. Got to add more workspaces…
Fudging with the PHP templating engine and miscellaneous bits of code from the CMS. By tomorrow, I’m hoping to fully dissect the engine and come up with
my own. I’m still busy noting the functions and classes. I’ll probably have a
half-decent documentation next week. I hope.
On a side note, I’m still very frustrated with PostgreSQL. I still couldn’t find the right combination in the pg_hba.conf that would allow me to connect to the database through PEAR. Oh well, it’s a separate thing
entirely — it’s a test system I’ll be deploying soon — it can wait.
And, oh: I was also to upload a news story and the newsletter yesterday. Today, I uploaded another news story and the posters. Doing these in the static site is such a pain, I can’t wait to deploy the CMS.
Got back from the Cagayan de Oro City conference. Turned out my poster paper was one of the finalists in the “Best Poster” competition.
Too bad I wasn’t able to enjoy the place because I was cooped up in the conference venue all day, and I was too tired to roam around at night. Well, next time around, I’ll bring my family.
Got new work assignments this month. Have to freshen the “look-and-feel” of the CMS site and introduce separate pages for different user types. Also have to refurbish the VClass front page. I’ll also have to look under the hood of the SMS-database interface.
