MT as a CMS?

Moveabletype as a CMS? Could it be so?

[zulufox]

I run a very large site in a altruic topic (1,000 articles).

After trying Typo3 (not xhtml complient), ASPBITE (crap), Mambo (Great, but not infinite categories). Someone gave me the suggestion to use moveabletype as a CMS.

This perked my ears to be sure, I had only heard praise about moveabletype, from it's awesome static pages, to its mods, to SEO, SEF url etc...

Version 3.1 will have unlimited categories thus making it the perfect open source search engine friendly CMS for us.

Furthermore, we qualify as a non-profit and thus get a massive discount for the purchase of this CMS.

For my site, forums, link directory, photo gallery and such are handled by other scripts, what I need is a CMS to handle news, tutorials, stores etc... basically: articles.

Here are my questions:

1. Does anyone know of a large site that uses MT has a CMS and not a blog software?

2. Is this idea stupid?

[rcjordan]

I'm not familiar with the inner workings of MT, but I do know that there have been many posts on webmaster-related forums saying that they do use it for CMS --so your idea is certainly on target.

That said, most of these MT/CMS hacks seemed to be by single webmasters who were the only one behind the controls of their sites. The first question I would have is whether you need multi-level access to the pages (as in publisher, editor, reporter) and, if so, does MT support that?

[encyclo]

The well-known design site Boxes and Arrows uses Movable Type as it's CMS, and it is more like the site you are describing, and it is certainly not a "blog". So, it shows that MT can be successfully adapted to many situations.

I believe you can do the same with WordPress [wordpress.org] too, and that's free and open source. It is based on the old b2 blogging system, can do valid XHTML "out of the box", multiple authors, categories, sub-categories... There is apparently a bit of cruft in the code left over from the old b2, but it is being cleaned up and is getting better with every generation. Worth a look.

[bill]

I use MT for several non-blog sites as a CMS. I'm hooked. I looked for over a year at CMS packages that would do what I want, and MT gave me the validating pages that I could control.

That said, most of these MT/CMS hacks seemed to be by single webmasters who were the only one behind the controls of their sites. The first question I would have is whether you need multi-level access to the pages (as in publisher, editor, reporter) and, if so, does MT support that?

Out of the box MT will let you set up authors with different levels of permissions. You select what they can do.

• Post
  
• Upload File
  
• Edit All Posts
  
• Edit Templates
  
• Edit Authors & Permissions
  
• Configure Weblog
  
• Rebuild Files
  
• Send Notifications
  
• Edit Categories
  
• Edit Address Book

However, they don't have this set up with multiple review levels that some of the big CMS packages have. This is focused on the individual blog more than full CMS functionality. However, using these permissions I've been able to let a small number of people access these sites and maintain the content. You can have various levels of checks and balances, but some of them have to be understood by the authors rather than be controlled by the software.

[amznVibe]

MT is incredibly powerful and can be extended to do almost anything on both the internal Perl side with plugins and hacks, as well as during runtime using PHP.

I've made a few sites using it in dynamic ways much more advanced than blogs.

Highly recommended. Only downside I have run into is on virtual (shared) servers, it can peg your cpu load rather high if you update alot of pages at once. Also when visitors leave comments, there is a slight delay before the page comes back, if there are many other comments (compared to a pure php solution like wordpress). But if you are on a dedicated server or lightly shared server that is not an issue. You can't beat the fact that you can make pure static pages with MT for fastest serving time, even under heavy server load.