Hacking MovableType
Posted January 19th, 2003 @ 11:13am by Erik J. Barzeski
The bloke (no, I'm not Australian or British) over at AntiPixel has enabled TrackBacks and forced his articles to rebuild when a trackback is received. So I thought I'd help him out by linking and "pinging" him. He will have been "punged" after this article is posted, if all goes well. Cool, eh? (No, I'm not Canadian.)
One of the reasons I'm drawn to MovableType is its ability to be hacked. Its insistence on CSS. Its integration with PHP. I just wish it was based on PHP so that you didn't have to do this silly "rebuild" crap every time you make the slightest change to something. Ugh.
4 Responses to "Hacking MovableType"
Posted 19 Jan 2003 at 11:27am #
I do prefer the rebuild approach - that is generation of "static files" (that can contain dynamic elements via php) vs. totally database driven sites. The load time is a big difference when you do not have a server farm at your disposal.
That said, I wish it was done in PHP but if their (ben&mena) strength is in Perl and means cranking out the product at a lower cost to us - I'll go along with it.
MovableType's hack ability and great tag language are what keep me attached to it.
Posted 19 Jan 2003 at 5:41pm #
As someone who lost any serious interest in hacking around with CGI scripts with a long time ago, I took one look a week ago at the Moveable Type download and thought, forget it!
I have actually become a big fan of Rael Dornfest's Blosxom blogging app. Yeah, it doesn't have all of the features of MT (I even had to change the code a bit to get it working precisely the way I wanted), but I'm a big fan of simplicity :-).
Posted 19 Jan 2003 at 5:42pm #
Well, you know, it's all about baked pages versus fried pages, and all the variations in-between. 🙂
Posted 18 Aug 2003 at 7:22pm #
I have to agree: which is why I went out and made a php version of Movabletype: of course, I haven't hacked the cgi script yet and gotten rid of that irritating rebuild... but it does pull dynamically from a mysql database. I'm now actually working on polls, universal categories, and several other bonus features for movabletype.