It’s high past time that I stopped using Movable Type 2.6.x on my servers. Various options present themselves.
The first is upgrading to Movable Type 3.x. This is undesirable for two reasons. I’m hitching my wagon to proprietary software that may have arbitrary changes in price and conditions whenever a new version is released. Further, the 3.x version would cost US$99, and while I can afford this, I’m hosting other people’s weblogs using this installation, with one exception, and none of them are paying me. So I don’t feel generous enough to do this.
The next is using a Free Software solution. This is appealing; it’s my default choice in all other kinds of software. However, in order to do this, the software should have available all the features of Movable Type that the users, or I their administrator (captor) need:
- Multiple weblog support.
- I have ten weblogs. I don’t want to make ten copies of the same piece of (PHP, because everything is in PHP) code in ten different directories; make either ten different databases or fifty different database tables; and give the same users varying permissions over ten different weblogs. This one is a surprisingly rare feature.
- User-based security.
- This is not so much because I think the users are EVIL as because they will make mistakes. If the software gives them edit access to all the blogs, they will regularly make posts in the wrong place.
- Web interface.
- Most of these people don’t have their own computer, they blog from labs or the library. Uploading text files doesn’t cut it.
- User editable templates.
- Julia wants this, at least, and probably Mos does too.
Now, The first requirement alone knocks out a huge number of the candidates. There are a few that remain. Pivot seems buggy and … odd (probably unusable by users weaned on MT). b2evolution really seems like the only other candidate.
The last alternative is writing my own, because there does rather seem to be a hole in the (quite considerable) market. However, I’ve already done this twice, once for puzzling.org and once ages ago for eyes, and it’s getting dull. And in neither of those cases have I gotten anywhere near things like comments, trackbacks, or other basically necessary features. And while I have no doubt that the basic features of multiple weblogs, multiple users, and web editing would be developed fairly rapidly, the list of stuff I’d need to do started looking a little nasty:
- I have to decide on a backend. Ew. And every time I change the code I have to have upgrade scripts. More ew.
- In order to have more than one other user and any co-developers at all, there is but one choice of language. (Unless it turned out to be such a killer app that web hosts around the world started installing twisted.web — unlikely.)
- Input validation and web based authentication are which of: horrible, easy to get wrong and boring? Answer: all of the above.
- Then there’s that old horror: prevention of evil. Even if I trust my users to avoid malicious markup the question of fending off comment spammers, referrer spammers, trackback spammers and other jerks will arise eventually.
- Letting users edit the templates is a huge input validation problem all on its own: how do you dig them out when they write an invalid template? (Getting them to write Nevow style templates? Well, anything’s possible.)
- In order to handle both my own and other people’s bizarro weblog setups, it would need to work with arbitrary file systems, arbitrary vhosts, and quite likely generate URLs specified by the user.
- In order to work with both my own and other people’s bizarro weblog setups, it would need to parse about twenty different types of export format.