Moveable Type

Has anyone installed it?

[tosspot17]

I'm having a look at a some blogging software for my site, and I came across Moveable Type, which seems to be a good option.

Does anyone else here use it?

My main concern is that i won't be able to set it all up as my knowledge doesn't go much beyond HTML. I want to incorporate it into an existing site design, is this possible?

Thanks for any help.

Chris.

[martinibuster]

I want to incorporate it into an existing site design, is this possible?

Yes.

You have to read the documentation carefully, and familiarize yourself with what it's doing. Basically, it calls in titles, footers, calendars and populates the web page with all this.

What you need to do is strip out the the calendars etc. that you don't need, and save only the portion that calls in the text and drop it in a container (td or div, or whatever) to hold it.

And be sure to replace it's default css with your own.

Don't be discouraged if at first it seems difficult. I had to wrestle with some things to make it work the first time I did it.

[mivox]

I installed it... they have some very nice templates to choose from. Or, if you have a template of your exisitng site, you can figure out how to insert the right parts.

It was a PITA though. I think Greymatter is easier to install... also a good free blog package.

The Moveabletype folks are also releasing a hosted blog solution called TypePad (or something like that)... I guess you can fully alter the templates for that as well, but not have to worry about the technical installation stuff. Don't know if it costs money or not.

[rogerd]

It's pretty good, although customization can be a bit tedious. You'll probably have to mess with some of the templates to get it less blog-like. Once it's set up, though, it's easy for non-technical people to add articles.

[paulrollo]

If your knowledge really doesn't go much beyond HTML then MT is probably not the right solution unless you can find someone who's confident with linux. The MT Markup Language is HTML-like but to make sense of the templates provided before modifying them you'd need to be familiar with CSS. You might be lucky and the install will work perfectly, mine took some work. Also it has dependencies so you'd need to be confident installing modules and may need root access, or a friendly root willing to install some as root.

[chiyo]

We use MT to run portions of one site, and when we reviewed all options a year or so back it seemed the best. It certainly is the most flexible CMS we have come accross, but that flexibility, as always, comes with some learning time. but back then it was free.

I havent found i need root access at all, as their system makes it possible to install any extra perl modules we needed in its own directory without root access.

It really does "work out of the box". You can have it up and running in basic and good looking form very quick, then you can customise it as you go and with your own knowledge of HTML (for templates) and CSS and the masses of add-ons available.

Be careful though. It is not free for commecial use, the cost is pretty high, and you need to pay for each domain you use it on.

We think its great but we are on the border of "commercial" and not, so always have a worry that one day we cant use it and all that customization an work will be gone, as the cost is not in anyway affordable for a site with no revenue (around 150 USD i think, but my memory may not be good on this)

There is one nice free blog-style perl-based software called bloxsom. you may want to look at that too.

[Clark]

It's good but I'm looking forward to a php blog tool.

[chiyo]

Clark: Ask and ye shall find...

[hotscripts.com...]

[rogerd]

One handy thing about MT (if you are using it as a cheap CMS) is the category setup. Most blogs are focused on date-based archives. MT (and some others, I assume) let you assign categories you name yourself. So, you can have a collection of articles about "Widget Maintenance", another about "Widget Collecting", etc. You can lose the date archiving display completely if you wish.

[eaden]

chiyo that link is broken right now..

rogerd, bBlog ( www.bblog.com ) is a free PHP blogging app with multiple categories. I havn't used MT, so I'm not sure if the bBlog categories work like the MT categories.