CMS Week - Movable Type - The Art Company's Blog

Many webmasters, when first setting things up, are faced with one of the most critical decisions one can make, that is, which CMS to use? There are many out there, all with their respective pros and cons. Out of the jungle, we continue to bring you our valuable reviews so you don't waste time juggling between the dozens of existing solutions. Today we're evaluating another heavy lifter: Movable Type.

What is Movable Type?

Movable Type (MT, in short) is a professional online publishing platform edited by Six Apart Ltd. Once released as a commercial product, it has recently been relicensed as free software under the GNU/GPL. Although MT is thus free to use, a commercial license still exists for "purposes where the end user is using MT to generate revenues from the endeavor". So as long as you use MT for non-commercial websites, you're good to go. Otherwise, you'll have to comply with the purchasing guidelines.

MT runs on Perl. That means you'll need to have Perl running on your web server. If you're using the standard LAMP setup (Linux-Apache-PHP-MySQL), you shouldn't have any issue since everything is configured by default. If you choose to run it on Microsoft's architecture, you'll have to download and install a Perl runtime environment first. For our testing purposes, we went for that second option, and we installed ActivePerl from activestate.com. You'll also need to create the appropriate script mappings for *.cgi and *.pl scripts, and ensure all the necessary Perl components are installed. We had some though times getting our setup lined up, especially when having to find the right packages for MySQL, but we ended up with the good framework. So ye be warned, this ain't for newbies!

MT installs itself through a wizard. You'll be taken through a dozen of screens to fill in the usual bunch of details: database server, admin user, time zone, mail account… Then you let the dices roll, and soon you can login to your admin console. Cool.

What's in Movable Type?

MT's administration module resembles closely to our yesterday's contender, WordPress. If you're used to the latter, you won't feel lost. The layout, the structure and the labels of the various options makes it easy to figure out what each does. There is no complicated menus, no obfuscated workflow, no dark paths to follow. Pretty much everything is simple and straightforward. In other words, MT's admin panel gives a very good impression at first sight. This, coupled with a nice design, pastel palette and a general "web 2.0" touch, creates a work environment that promotes quick adoption.

Since MT is built on a multi-site engine, the admin console features two different color schemes to differentiate the administration level, so you always know where you are. A blue palette for the management of a given site, and a greenish one for the management of the whole system. Once again, simple.

The admin interface is very action-oriented: Create, Manage, Design. It's content-centric as well. When you land of the dashboard — the heart of the admin module — you're presented with the latest posts and comments, as well as some shortcuts to the most used features.

Creating content — that is, posts and articles — also looks very close to what you'd find it WordPress. Although there may be some subtle differences in the interface, the way of doing is pretty much the same. You can add tags and keywords, write your own friendly URL, select a destination folder (for pages only, obviously), schedule publishing to a later date/time, add categories on-the-fly, and choose to allow or not comments and trackbacks. You can also upload files and directly create posts from them (the uploaded items will show up later in the assets manager).

Another strong similarity between MT and WordPress is the theming engine. Here again, it relies on three components: templates, stylesheets and widgets. These have exactly the same purpose: templates describes pages, stylesheets define their visual appearance, and widgets add extra features. If you're unfamiliar with these concepts, we strongly recommend you read our WordPress review.

MT Templates are text files containing MTML code (MTML stands for Movable Type Markup Language). MTML instructions output content from MT that is marked up with HTML, XML, Javascript, or other languages. These templates may have code portions written is PHP, ASP, or any other dialect spoken by the server.

A nice "plus" offered by MT is the StyleCatcher plug-in: a visual interface to download and install new themes. With this utility, it's very easy to browse, zoom and choose your preferred design.

Similarities end up with plug-ins. MT has lots of them, since the community has been proactive. The repository on MT's website is well organized, but installing plug-ins is rather hectic. Unlike WordPress or DotClear, there's no automated installation system. You have to check plug-in by plug-in for the installation instructions, and then proceed as described. There a two levels of plug-ins sets. One for the general system, and the other by site. Some plug-ins provide functionalities for both system- and site- level, others will be restricted to one level only. If both are provided, system-level settings will always have precedence and may be used to override each site defaults.

Since MT has multi-site capabilities, it had to have that extra level of features for managing multiples blogs or websites. These features allow the main administrator to seamlessly perform general routine maintenance tasks, while the hierarchical user model ensures a strong security and a streamlined workflow.

MT's documentation is rich and extremely well done. It provides different approaches whether you're a blogger, an author, a designer, an administrator or a developer. For those who chose to go for the commercial edition of MT, there's also a set of community or enterprise-oriented documentation. As said before, MT is fed by an enthusiast and proactive community, and if you should get lost, you'd have the choice between a Wiki, a forum, mailing lists, IRC, Twitter and a number of blogs devoted to the platform.

Main Features

Clean User Interface
Editable Assets
Template Sets
Valid, Well-formed XHTML Post Content
Template Tags
Custom Fields
Multi-blog
Content Replication Across Multiple Servers
Globally Shared Template Modules
OpenID Support
Proactive Community
Effective Hierarchical User Model

Strengths

Simple and easy to use
Highly customizable
Powerful specific markup language (MTML)
Great documentation

Weaknesses

Not available as open-source for commercial use
Looks (a lot) like WordPress
Need for Perl on Microsoft platforms may be a stopper

Conclusion

Overall, MT is clearly a winner. Despite a confusing resemblance with WordPress, it's a well put-together and solid alternative to consider for your online presence. MT is fairly simple to install, administer and use, and its extra multi-site features makes it one of the most convenient systems to build blog farms. Having to rely on Perl may give you some headaches if you're not used to that environment, however, the friendly community will help you find your way to the light. So is it worth a try? Yeah, definitely!