blogging tools: May 2005 Archives

Whilst I've been working on talkeuro, several issues have come to the fore. MovableType is great, but it is very focused on single author or publisher setups, at least from the point of view of template management. MT does a good job of managing actually writing new content for your site, the template management side is weaker.

Where MovableType has problems is in two key areas. The first is more generic and is about multiuser access to templates. There is no obvious way to hook something like subversion into MT so that several people working on site templates can do so and not worry about clobbering one another when saving changes. You can imagine a system where all the templates are pulled out of MT and on the filesystem, then managed via subversion. There might be hooks to do this, so that an update to subversion (or CVS) will trigger a rebuild in MT. Ideally I want to edit in my development environment, preview easily and then commit changes.

Secondly a way for MT to allow the same weblog content to appear under two sets of templates. eg www.talkeuro.com and staging.talkeuro.com would be really handy to come from the same database content. Thus allowing easy testing and bugfixing, whilst not live to the world. You can fake this, by having multiple templates and publishing to shadow directories, but it is fragile.

Another issue for me with talkeuro is multi-lingual support. Talkeuro has an english and a french version. To manage both of these I need to maintain two separate sets of templates, where ideally I'd have one template and if french use (Voyez cette section) and if english use (See this section). This is roughly how the internal localization of MT works. So as talkeuro gains languages and I want to add functionality to it, I need to hand edit each template or place each code fragment in a separate template module, which starts to get tedious.

I'd love to see these areas addressed in a future version of MT, 3.16 is a good step along the road, but more is needed to make it really scale for more complex CMS type applications.

I got a new phone at the weekend, a Nokia 6630 with 3G and a quite nice megapixel camera. To this I've added Lifeblog which is super, it collects together your pictures and messages placing them on day by day views. From this simple interface you can then select and directly post to TypePad or Flickr (howto), with others in the pipeline. The combination has really encouraged my desire for mobile blogging. I neither know nor care about the Windows application.

One other clever thing is the data transfer application which ships with the 6630, this lets you copy across your contacts and pictures from your old Nokia phone, a 6600 in this case. Excellent idea, it even copies the application to the old phone over Bluetooth. It'd need to do until Apple can sort out iSync with my 6630, it seems it doesn't even work on Tiger yet. Further thoughts on the 6630 to come later in the month, suffice to say I thought I was happy with the 6600 and only upgraded as it was free, but it is a marked improvement.