Why I Hate Movable Type

If I can’t remember the Movable Type tag to include a module in template, I have to go through 40 clicks before I can even DOWNLOAD THE FUCKING MANUAL (WTF?!) to read it to find the damned tag.
MAKE IT FUCKING EASIER, PEOPLE. Fucking learn something from Apple.
Somehow, I have no hopes whatsoever that Movable Type 4.0 will be anything less than a convoluted fucking mess that I can’t install and make work with my site.
MAKE IT FUCKING EASIER, PEOPLE. Fucking learn something from Apple.

This Post Has 7 Comments

  1. Jerame

    Steph…Calm down. There is a Template Tag reference right on their site. I use it all the time. Here’s the link…http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/docs/3.3/a_template_tag_reference/
    It’s the second link on the documentation page. Very easy to get to, so I’d be curious what path you’re taking. I always click Support, then 3.3 Documentation, then scroll down to the Template Tag Reference link. 3 clicks…
    As for MT 4, I’ve already installed it on a test domain. Love it…It’s still buggy, but it’s already 20 times better than the current version. The interface is much better. Like I said, still very buggy, but it finally incorporates the features you need in a CMS.
    If you want, I’ll give you a login to it so you can play around with it.

  2. Steph Mineart

    My job is usability studies and interface design – and Movable Type just doesn’t cut the mustard, in comparison to Word Press or even Expression Engine, when it comes to usability. You may be able to find them, Jerame, but their support docs on their website are not easily accessible enough. If I have to hunt around to find it, it’s not good enough.

    I’m sure 4.0 will be a better interface, but I’m sure that since I have highly customized templates, and their default templates are badly over done with tags and way too many classes and ids, updating my templates for 4.0 will be a nightmare.

  3. Marti Abernathey

    WordPress is great for blogs, and multi-blog (wordpress mu) sites, but as a CMS, it sucks. More and more people I know are using Joomla for a backend. I’m Sixapart has ruined every company they’ve taken over. Movable Type and Livejournal are prime examples. I will always take something that is community supported and free over something that has a fanancial underpinning. The developer base is 1000x times better for wordpress than MT.

  4. lisa

    i’m a few rev levels back on MT, i think (3.1xx) and feel no motivation to upgrade. it’s not really a CMS, it’s blogging software.
    on my version, i use the Help link at the top of all the menu screens to access the template reference and it gets me there pretty quick. not sure if that link is still there in later versions.
    we are writing our own CMS at work, and i’m doing the UI design, that’s for the external web site. for the intranet, we recently started researching open source CMS options and Drupal seems to blow everything out of the water. the UI, the docs, the richness of the available modules, the number of people using it (and writing new modules for it), everything. once i gain some Drupal expertise at work I will definitely approach the radio station and offer to set up a drupal site for them. it’ll be a very good fit.
    i attempted to implement Zope/Plone for the station a few years back on the advice of a developer friend. very. bad. experience. horrible UI, sad feature set, poor docs. i wish we’d started with drupal; the site would be done now if we had.
    anyway. i’ve done creative stuff with MT, and i use it to drive the nbeast site and various other non-blog sites, but it’s really not a CMS. wordpress mu comes closer but drupal still blows it out of the water.
    joomla i looked at briefly but i think it looked a lot harder to get started with, or it didn’t meet our needs in some way. i discarded it for some reason.

  5. Steph Mineart

    For some reason, my help link doesn’t go where it’s supposed to. I have some weird configuration issue that I’ve had since I originally installed on my other host, and I’ve never seemed to be able to get it straightened out even after going over it 12 times and having two different hosts look into it. But my help doesn’t link correctly, I can’t find the movable type docs on my server, and most recently, I can’t get iconomatic or plugins manager installed correctly.

    I’m really irritated that the tag reference isn’t inline – why the hell should I have to go to their site at all to find it?

    I think a lot of my frustration is that I really need content management software, not a blogging tool, and I can’t quite bend movable type to do what I want.

    We looked at Joomla at work for some projects and decided against it.

    I’ve heard great things about drupal. The one that lots of big designers are using is expression engine, which I’m curious about, too.

  6. Jerame

    There’s also http://www.mttags.com…Just FYI.
    Joomla sucks. Totally. It’s just too complicated and messy for my tastes.
    Wordpress is good, actually. But being 100% dynamic, there can be all sorts of performance issues, downtime, etc. Particularly if you’re being hosted commercially and your SQL server is located on a separate box from your webserver or your webserver/SQL server are way oversubscribed. Plugins for caching can help this, but I’ve run into way to may “WP couldn’t connect to the database” errors online to think that WP doesn’t have some inherent problems. I’ve considered switching to it several times, but I just think MT is better.
    Drupal is OK, but it’s still way over-complicated and much harder to implement custom templates, etc. I created the American Values Alliance website in Drupal. I wasn’t impressed, but I do like some of the features.
    Expression engine is commercial and proprietary. I’m just not interested. I’ve played with a demo and it’s OK, I guess. Nothing special.
    MT sucks in many of it’s own ways, but I’ve found it better than anything else out there for what I need. MT 4 is actually going to be a CMS, not just blogging software. It has multiple new features (that I’m testing and work well) that help it out of the “I’m just a blog platform” category.
    I admit to having my own fits with MT at times, but having installed it in multiple environments and having built sits on other CMS platforms, I’m sticking with MT for now. I think they’re making massively cool changes for MT 4 and that most of these complaints will be moot in the next version.
    I agree that docs have always been an issue with MT. I’m hoping they’ll do something better in the future. I haven’t seen any improvements to the docs in the new version, but one can always hope.

  7. Steph Mineart

    I have a site I can load MT 4.0 on to play around with it, which is probably what I’ll do before I make any sudden moves.

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