Movable Type 3.3 First Impressions

September 13th, 2006

Movable Type 3.3 First Impressions

Yes, Movable Type (MT) 3.3 has been out since early July, but considering the unimpressive changes touted for it in late May, I chose to ignore it. At least, until now.

Recently, I finally decided to move my MT blogs to a new host, and instead of keeping with my older MT 3.2 install or switch to WordPress (WP), I decided to import my entries into a fresh install of MT 3.3. What? Surprised I’d consider anything but WP? While I’m now an ardent WP fan and run most of my blogs on it (and focus most of my blog platform-related articles on it), I actually first started out with MT, so I still have a soft spot for it - tiny as it has become over the past year. Besides, diversity on this blog is always important, eh?

Anyway, back to my first impressions. Going back to basics, I installed MT manually via FTP, and as usual, went through the MT configuration file. Surprisingly, only core options were left in there, making it very much similar to WP’s own config file. If my memory serves me right, MT 3.2 has tens of options - most useless to the first timer. Next was the installation script, which for some reason seemed slicker than usual. Of course, it could have been the uhmm…. AJAX:

Past install, it was time to setup my first blog. And lo and behold, both the layout and prompts seemed to have been streamlined towards new users:

On a related note, the separation between beginner/basic and advanced settings seems to have been made far more distinct. You now have to toggle the advanced settings before they’ll appear. On basic mode, only the most general settings are available:

Only on advanced mode will you get the tabs experienced MT users are used to:

Clearly, Six Apart is sparing no effort to relabel itself away from the “clunky and difficult to install/manage” image it has garnered. A good attempt, but they could still do better. In some instances, I feel they haven’t done enough. For one, I’d like to see dynamic publishing (ala WordPress) easily turned on. Maybe just one simple checkbox on the basic settings page.

And in other instances, I think they’ve gone too far. Can you believe that both categories and tags were left out of the basic New Entry (Write Post in WP speak) view?

I can understand not confusing first timers with the mix of categories and tags, but categories should have at least been switched on. After all, I’m not aware of any other major blogging platform with category entry turned off by default. Feel free to correct me of course.

Last but not least, I played with MT’s tags implementation. Entry (once turned on) was intuitive, with the comma-delimited list system used. Tag management was standard. Nothing spectacular that I could see on first use.

Overall, Movable Type 3.3 looks like a step in the right direction - though it’s a bit weak in terms of progress. Here, MT-fans will argue that its robust enough to need only a few tweaks in each revision, but the blogosphere in general doesn’t seem to agree. Do a Google search on “movable type wordpress” (or vice versa) to see what I mean. But then, MT seems to be marketing itself towards enterprise users, so all the gSearches I’ve made could mean absolutely nothing.

What do you think?

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