Coredump

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.