First steps with MT4 (2) - arranging the content
Having decided upon the content and structure, at least as a starting
point, we need to start to control the way this content appears on the
website. The standard format of all entries appearing on the home page in reverse chronological order and all the category archives by date isn't what we want in this case.
Only the entries tagged as 'Articles' will appear in the main blog part of the home page. Entries tagged as 'Morgue', 'Resources' and 'How to' will appear in separate flows. For now, these entries will not appear on the home page other than as lists of titles under the appropriate category headings - the full entry will not appear on the home page.
I'm going to resist the temptation and leave the styling alone for now - just concentrate on the content! I'm working with the default templates as there is some good stuff in there that I don't want to lose. I don't understand how half of it works but it's too good to chuck away so I'm keeping it in the hope that I can eventually understand it and use it.
Now onto the initial changes to the default templates...
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.
TimsNotes created with Movable Type
After a long search for the 'right' content management system, I finally opted for Movable Type 4 to create this site. Other contenders included Drupal, Expression Engine, MOD.x and WordPress. These were rejected for a variety of reasons - too complicated, too difficult to learn, unresponsive support/forums (or they did respond but they didn't answer the question asked!), or I just plain couldn't get them to work. MT nearly went into the bin for the last two reasons, but just when I was about to give up, after endless fiddling and trying different things it suddenly burst into life and saved itself.The appeal of MT4 is it's state-of-the-art blogging features and it's ability to combine with stand-alone or static pages to create an integrated website with static content and blog content, all managed from the same CMS. How well it delivers on this, we'll find out over the next few weeks...
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