On Oct 24th I ranted pretty hard on Movable Type not only on my blog, but also in my podcast. In my opinion, it was well-deserved. Bryne Reese at Six Apart listened and did some work on his own time to put together a podcasting plugin for Movable Type.
My schedule has been pretty crazy and I have not had a chance to test it yet, but I am pretty confident that the plugin will gets us started in the right direction. I have remained loyal to Movable Type because it simply does a lot more than Wordpress does. The management of the multiple sites I run under a single installation of MovableType cannot be accomplished with any other blogging platform.
But like many other Moveable Type users I have been fairly critical of the pace of development, and their continued focus more on their pro-net developers versus listening to end users. I think they still have some work to do to get connected with their user community again.
I do appreciate Bryne and I am hopeful that he understands and the rest of the team understands that many of us remain passionate MT users and have invested heavily in development of our brand with MT, and hope that they really listen to our needs as time moves forward.
There is one more thing, though, that I completely disagree with, and this is SixApart’s continued heavy investment and promotion of ATOM. They have been trying without success to get vendors aka Apple iTunes and others to support enclosures in ATOM feeds. First of all, the public is already confused enough. But give me a break. ATOM has not been widely adopted and for the time being RSS will be the way Podcasts are delivered and indexed.
I don’t publicly display my Atom feed and in fact have not looked at the template in several years simply because RSS readers and syndication sites largely do not support it.
I look forward to the core podcasting changes and also look forward to updating my MT installation so it can be upgraded to MT4. MovableType.org
Hi Todd,
I don’t think that your rant was that harsh – the new MT 4 is not user friendly. In fact, it is a nightmare. SixApart has completely ignored end users. The limited number of plugins, the impossibility of exporting templates easily (unless you want to spend $100 to buy a plugin), the extremely difficulty (if not impossibility) to moblog, a support forum that resembles a ghost town, are just a few of the major problems with MT4.
I finally gave up and am now converting my blogs to WordPress. Sure, it can’t handle multiple blogs (which I think is one MP’s worst problems) but, even then, it is far, far easier to accomplish everything else with it. It’s really a shame but MT4 is such an albatross and the more time that transpires without significant changes will only going to lead to the demise of a program that had so many possibilities.
See, and this is where I’d differ. I just switched from WordPress back to MovableType; I was one of the many users who dropped when they “went corporate”.
I liked WordPress. I can say a lot of nice things about it. Yet, I find MT4’s interface and management much easier and simpler to navigate. Since a lot of my readership overlaps with my LiveJournal, the big “selling point” was the ease that they could comment on my MT blog; I tried multiple times to install the OpenID plugin for WordPress, but failed miserably.
Now, mind you, I just blog. If I was to podcast, or to manage templates, I’d likely share more of your issues.