First steps with MT4 (1) - structuring the content
MT4 (rc1) is now working OK on my IIS server after some initial difficulties that weren't covered in the documentation or knowledgebase - at least not as far as I could see. The main problem was the wizard not running because it said it couldn't see the mt-static folder (even though it could), no matter where I put it or what permissions I gave it. The answer in the end was to abandon the wizard, make my own mt-config file and setup the configuration manually. This was disappointing firstly because I wanted to see how the wizard worked, and secondly because there was no response either to the bug report I sent in or to the article posted on the support forum - not quite the interested and active developers/community that I had seen claimed.
Anyway, now it's working beautifully and all past frustrations are forgotten and forgiven. I'm now looking at how I can use it to develop the sort of sites that this project is about - integrated static pages and blogs where the users can manage the content themselves. It's immediately apparent that although MT will produce a very well-featured, well structured and reasonable looking blog right out of the box with no customisation needed, it is going to need some fairly extensive customisation to even begin to produce the sort of sites I'm looking at. This site is a test bed that I'll use to explore MT as a platform for developing and managing sites with integrated static and blog content.
Anyway, now it's working beautifully and all past frustrations are forgotten and forgiven. I'm now looking at how I can use it to develop the sort of sites that this project is about - integrated static pages and blogs where the users can manage the content themselves. It's immediately apparent that although MT will produce a very well-featured, well structured and reasonable looking blog right out of the box with no customisation needed, it is going to need some fairly extensive customisation to even begin to produce the sort of sites I'm looking at. This site is a test bed that I'll use to explore MT as a platform for developing and managing sites with integrated static and blog content.
Firstly (and least importantly) although MT claims lots of great new templates that are ready to use, really there aren't that many - they are just variations in colour schemes on the same themes. So to avoid a site that looks exactly like 50,000 other MT4 sites, we're going to have to redesign the templates fairly immediately. Not a problem and something I expected to have to do anyway.
The meat of the issue regarding using MT to produce combine static sites and blogs (wish I could think of a name for this - stablogs??) is how to structure the content in such as way as to facilitate the integration of these two types of content.
This site has five main types of content (so far):
The meat of the issue regarding using MT to produce combine static sites and blogs (wish I could think of a name for this - stablogs??) is how to structure the content in such as way as to facilitate the integration of these two types of content.
This site has five main types of content (so far):
- Articles (straightforward blog content, reverse chronological order, latest ones appear on home page, can be long)
- How To's (technical notes, code samples etc., separate from articles)
- Morgue (collection of reference material - screenshots, URLs, notes etc., separate from articles)
- Resources (like How To's but different - I'm not sure how exactly!)
- Single static pages (such as About, Contact, Services)
- Assorted little goodies, gadgets and widgets (digg del.icio.us etc.) just to play with and try out
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