by Derek—2003.09.11 @ 2218
I'm no pro yet, but I am starting to really enjoy this blogging thing. I'm a huge journal fan and writer, and am known for saying and doing (seemingly) random things, but when it comes to writing down randomness in a semi-permanent fashion on the web, I have found I don't have much to say.
However, I think that if I could come up with a column of sorts, I could easily fill it with content. Give me purpose, and I achieve.
With that, I thought I'd share my ups and downs with installing and configuring Movable Type on my site.
I've been working on my own content management system for some time, taking my cue from Troy Bowman, to deploy my websites. This first started as an outgrowth of a website I designed for my brother Jason and his school. I was flexing my newly developed muscle (Perl and MySQL) and was really enjoying it. The more I developed the site, the more features were added, until I wanted to have this same "automation" and dynamic content on my own site. This has grown even more as I've done freelance for other clients. I quickly saw the advantage of designing, building, and programming one suite of tools that could be templatized and used in a multitude of ways.
Justin Rohner (Cousin)
Rachelle Rohner (Aunt)
Robert Barrett (BYU professor, fine artist)
Shakespeare Theatre Association of America
...and the list goes on.
Everybody wanted too much costumization. I began to have less time. I thought I had abstracted the design enough from the programming that each "client" could edit the templates and I wouldn't have to touch anything. The program was in CVS, so I could easily make updates to several sites with a touch of a button, per se.
I still love programming, and I want to complete my CMS badly. However, ever since I found out about Movable Type, I realized that I was heading in a direction that had already been taken. Still, I was hesitant because I liked having control over my content. I liked having the ability to change things. But the time involved in developing it all has taken away my ability to make updates to my own site!
Faced with less time in the future, and more demands to make updates, I decided to "test" out Movable Type. If I could manage to get it to work, it should work for everyone.
The installation was really quite easy. I followed the steps, first making sure all the Perl modules were properly installed. The only glitch I had was interfacing with MySQL. For security reasons, MT makes sure the MySQL login has a matching database-level GRANT table with the proper permissions for the host you are connecting to. Once this was enabled, I was on my way.
Once installed, making new blogs was easy. The challenge was figuring out how to structure the blogs to resemble "normal" websites with almost static content. Blogs, by their very nature, are time sensitive. I had to figure out ways to overcome this for some applications (like my brother's site) where pages kept a more static feel.
I first did this by creating a new blog for each new section of the site. Millcreek High School's site has a few generic sections: About Us, Handbook, and Faculty. The Faculty I may still have to use my own programs, but the other two sections fit nicely into MT's design.
The hurdle was figuring out how MT used HTML::Template to manage the customization. I was archving all the entries individually into a specific folder. In my beginning status, I basically copied the template tags from the main index/summary page into the individual archive pages. The problem with this was MT found template tags in the individual archive page that made them act like the index page, so I was getting summaries on the wrong page.
The solution was going back to the default MT templates and making sure I didn't have the wrong template variables in my pages. I took some time to read the MT documentation (what, I should have done that first?) and it all made more sense.
I'm still learning how to harness the power of MT, but it looks exciting. I'm hoping to use this tool more effectively in the future, perhaps finding a way to manage my personal journal as well (although, I doubt I'd publish it to the web).
My big job now is learnig some crash-course work of layout in CSS. I've decided to completely break away from using HTML tables to handle basic layout problems and only use tables where tabular data demands. This makes my design time a little longer, because I don't do it with a WYSIWYG editor --- its all by hand, baby!
So, off I go. School in the morning.