I'm starting to lean towards very mixed feelings about Movable Type these days. OK, it's still the leading blog platform, and its mix of dynamic editing and static publishing is a smart thing to do, but after the migration from 3.17 to 3.2, I'm seriously considering backing out again.
Unrelated to my particular situation, Typepad's abysmal performance is proving that Perl CGI's, even when running inside mod_perl, are not the way to build massively scalable multi-user systems. But since I've never been a Typepad user, I'm not too concerned about this, and am already looking forward to all skynetblogs refugees who will soon encounter performance issues with the new Telenet competition. Told you!
With everybody moving to WordPress, one can wonder why I'm not switching myself. Well, WordPress has no multiblog feature to start with, so it's no likely candidate for replacing MT here. Also, I'm absolutely no fan of the idea to install PHP on my server. I've done a bit of PHP in the past, and the idea of hosting an under-specified program execution context inside my web server isn't very appealing to me. Call me old-fashioned, I don't care.
Plus I do like MT's template language, and I'm not very keen on using WP's alternative, which allows you to embed plain PHP code in your templates if you want. That's plain ugly.
My main peeve with MT after the upgrade however is the comment spam detection. In my 3.17 era, things were relatively manageable using conversationkiller, MT-Blacklist and SpamLookup. Go and read those links. The poor sod who wrote conversationkiller says Sixapart prefers people to use the shiny new 3.2 comment spam system instead, MT-Blacklist and its author have been assimilated by Mena's - I so hard want you to believe we're good people - company, and SpamLookup has been consumed by the Trotties as a default plugin.
Now, with two out of three good spam protection tools becoming part of 3.2, one would believe that an upgrade would assure you of a spam-free future. Nope: quite the contrary. While 3.17 and my spam fighting combo logged numerous comment attempts as spam, 3.2 is about as spam-safe as having sex with a triple-used condom.
Oh yes, marking comments as Junk is all very nice and Ajax-y (not real Ajax, just a sprinkle of Javascript), and the UI is rrrrreally good-looking, but frankly, I don't want to mark Junk as Junk. The system should figure that out for me. Bleh.
Update: installed SCode. Too bad for the visually-challenged people, and sorry for the captcha-haters, but SCode seems to handle spambots quite well - so far. And aaargh: just found out that a tiny Instiki (RoR) Wiki I'm running is filling up my /tmp space with session persistency files. Seriously: is there one server-side scripting language capable of running long-lived processes without leaking memory or filling up server resources?
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If you can avoid WP then do so: it takes too many man-hours to keep up to date on the security situation with them. They don't use their announce list and they've made security releases without inflating the version number.
Have you tried Roller yet? I switched form MT to Roller in the beginning of this year and I'm really happy with it. The new 2.0 release, which came out 4 days ago, has full support for group blogging. And there's the pluggable comment authenticator where you can choose between a math-question comment authenticator or a CAPTCHA comment authenticator.
Mo Wouter toch - ik heb mij een ongeluk verschoten. Via uwen blog op Flickr geraakt: ik zou u niet meer herkend hebben als ik u op straat zou tegenkomen.
Er zijn inderdaad al verschillende kilootjes bijgekomen, alhoewel ik nu een stuk sportiever ben dan vroeger. ;-)