In case you were wondering why no updates – well there was a server outage and MoveableType has been acting up once again. Anyway between the two, things were well bad. So perhaps you can excuse me for not writing and posting. Things are back to normal but I am considering switching hosts and blogging tools. Any recommendations would be greatly helpful.
there has been some serious bug with the MT and it has deleted the comments icon for some reason. hence I need to post here to get the conversation started
Try wordpress. It is easy to setup. There 1.2 beta is out. Should be GA in few days.
Pankaj
Not sure who you are hosting with (LogicInternet.com?), but I am switching MobileTracker over to pair in the next week or two. I already switched CarbWire there, and love it. They are pros.
(FWIW: I have never heard of MT deleting an icon. Maybe your template got changed? Maybe your host lost the icon?)
I just want to second the kudos for http://www.pair.com.
These guys are true internet age heros, they started early in the game, stuck to their core business (web hosting), offer awesome service, and they’re great professionals.
They host tens of thousands of sites and many of the top internet sites.
I’ve done business with them in the past and they are the best. eos.
PS. Ping their sites and you’ll see how skilled they are at optimizing routing tables.
Jon – what CMS are you using? It is a toss up between wordpress and expression engine for me. pair sounds good – i am going to try them out.
I’d also vote for WordPress for you… I made the switch and it’s been a great deal smoother for me. As much as I liked MT, it had it’s hangups… rebuilding and speed being two that drove me crazy.
You can import all your MT posts, comments and even users directly into a WP site…There are also nice ways to leave the MT in place and just move on with permanent redirects so the search engines get you and automatically move your traffic.
1.2 is an excellent update and will be a very welcome release… I’ve been playing with nightlies for a while.
Om: I’m using MovableType. It’s not as big of a deal now that I’m on Pair, but when I was on Dreamhost I wanted to keep things lean and mean (static pages). A media mention or two can take out a “eh” server serving dynamic pages.
Pair’s server seems speedy in the rebuild process. But I have built it to use includes in such a manner that I only need to rebuild for content changes.
We are going to be launching a site using Drupal (most likely) fairly soon. But both WordPress and Expression Engine look good. Drupal has better “community” features, and gets away from the whole blog scene. All three are great products though.
I recommend Drupal. It is a mature CMS that works for blogs and other lite content management tasks. Based on PHP & Mysql, very stable and easy to use.
I think the problem with Drupal will be redesigning the entire site, and I an not equipped to handle that. well that is my big problem. otherwise it seems to be a pretty nifty little piece of software
Drupal questions:
1. How to edit the themes?
2. Does it work with desktop clients?
3. MT to Drupal import tool?
4. Other known issues of switching from MT?
Om: You bring great points. I should add that the site I’ll be using Drupal for is not moving from something else, which makes it easier.
1) Themes – once the weak point if you weren’t a programmer. However, they are working on that. Some of the newer stuff isn’t too bad. Just grab one of the CSS based themes and mess with the stylesheet.
2) Supports the Blogger API
3) Not that I’ve seen. But if your MT install is MySQL based, it will likely make it easier.
4) It has been done. Here are some good directions. Here’s a thread on Drupal’s site.
If you want some help, let me know. I’ll be knee deep in this stuff within a few weeks, and would love to help out a resource I use all the time (for MobileTracker).
Jon – thanks for these and i will go through the links and the process and see if I have any success. thanks for helping out. appreciate it