Took a little bit of time yesterday to catch up on some of the install To Do’s that have been on my plate. Among the applications I installed and played with was TextPattern, a nicely functional CMS that has some blog-like features. As I was discussing with Mark Shuttleworth this morning, I was compelled to install this application mainly because I really liked Vladimir Agafonkin’s Serene theme, that appears to be available only for TextPattern. Pretty, after all, is a feature, and Serene’s got that in spades.
But the effort involved in getting that template set up on the instance of TextPattern I put on my machine [1] was enough to convince me that the CMS may be a little more functionality that I require on a day to day basis. Rather than the unpack a tarball into a specific directory theme installation common to most blogging clients, this required some rather tedious hand editing of templates.
Besides TextPattern, I was particularly excited to get Typo up and running (see inset picture). For those of you that are unaware, Typo is a blogging platform similar to Movable Type or WordPress implemented in Ruby on Rails. While it was surprisingly difficult to get up and running for a Rails app (I never did get it working with mod_fastcgi, only mod_fcgid; these instructions were helpful), once in it was very nice. To see how the application would work with actual content, I dumped our production Movable Type database (much easier now that it’s lighter by 1.3 million activity rows ;), and used Typo’s MT Ruby converter script to migrate my MT entries into Typo. Apart from a formatting issue – I can’t seem to get Typo to convert line breaks as does MT, and therefore I lose paragraph formatting – everything seems to have imported nicely, even comments and trackbacks. It took about 45 minutes to convert the 840+ entries, however – TextPattern converted the same DB in about 5. There’s a lot to like about the platform – the Ajax-ified live search feature, similar to what’s in MediaWiki 1.6 being one of them. It’s also got some built in sidebar integrations for del.icio.us, Flickr, TaDa lists, Upcoming events, and the like. I don’t know how solid the anti-spam functionality is because I’m running it behind a firewall, but it does offer link, IP and string based filtering. Besides, it’s not as if I’m particularly thrilled with Movable Type’s capabilities in that area – the migration to 3.2 has been a real headache in that regard.
At the moment, I have no immediate plans to migrate off of Movable Type, mainly out of a concern for the existing links. Without a plan to preserve the existing URI structure for the benefit of both Google and the del.icio.us using crowd, I’m not going anywhere. But it’s good to know that the content in Movable Type is essentially portable, thanks to converter scripts. And who knows, one of these could end up being the basis for the future denvertechmeetup.com site.
Next up on the agenda? I’m blowing away my inhouse server, currently running Gentoo, and laying down a beat of Ubuntu’s Dapper Drake. For the Gentoo fans in the audience, don’t sweat it: my laptop is still Gentoo and will remain so for the foreseeable future. But given the focus I’ve been placing on Debian and Ubuntu recently, I need to be running them on a more regular basis than having it available on test machines.
[1] For Gentoo users, be sure your version of PHP is compiled with the XML USE flag, otherwise your installation of TextPattern will fail. If you see xml_parser error, that’s your problem. Steps to fix are:
- Compile dev-lang/php with USE=”php”
- Restart Apache – “/etc/init.d/apache2 restart”
- Drop your database in MySQL
- mysql -u username -p
- drop database databasename
- Create a new database – w/in MySQL, create database databasename;
- Proceed with your TextPattern install
