Right. But we are in PDT. So that will be 9-11 am on your watch (until daylight savings time ends).
]]>Did you realise issue #194 is actually fixed? (I updated it now to reflect that.) Do you know how it was fixed? By writing a self-contained Dancer app that does nothing other than render the front page, straight from the database, entirely outside the Movable Type codebase.
We’re on Movable Type because Six Apart, when they still existed, graciously donated a large amount of developer time to build an installation and theme for us that would work for the needs of blogs.perl.org – it was, though, essentially thrown over the wall, since none of us really knew anything about MT. We had two options: use that and get the site running without being able to maintain it ourselves, or don’t use it and wait to find the time to build our own system… someday. (Plus, I was the only one who was already wary of MT at the time – the others hadn’t had any experience with it to warn them.) So we made the pragmatic choice – I was unhappy but I relented because better something than nothing. And as long as Six Apart existed and they were willing to carry out our coding, that worked. But they got bought out not long afterwards and the amount of donated time took a noise dive. Ever since, very little has gotten fixed, and there is so much to fix. But for us to do that, there are two problems – first, getting familiar enough with MT, which is a large and complicated system; secondly, doing so in spite of the knowledge that it’s most likely a sunk effort, an investment without a future. A recent MT update broke this commenting/session interaction, and we have no idea why – it seems likely due to b.p.o customisations rather than something in stock MT.
What we have fixed, we have fixed by subverting MT, mostly. (E.g. automatic post truncation.)
So if you have the time and inclination to write a multi-user blogging platform that we can replace MT with, don’t think you have to find ways to bypass blogs.perl.org: we’re all ears ourselves. We’d be happy to have something to replace MT with. And no need to screen-scrape – you’d get to suck it straight out of the database. No need to do this the hard way.
Come talk to us.
]]>Over the years I've come to tolerate MT, but one wishlist I still like to see is comment reply notification by email. Does MT have that?
As for perlmonks, they have their own sets of WTFs, but understandably the codebase is much older and it targetted HTML 3.2 or something. One particular UI weirdness: to clear reply notifications, you have to press [Talk] but does not say anything in the input box. Perhaps they should've added another button or checkbox isntead.
]]>I don't understand why pre + code are both needed to format code snippet instead of just pre or code
Because you’re writing HTML and in HTML the <code>
is for saying that something is code while <pre>
is for saying that whitespace is significant. The syntax highlighting is then done separately in the browser, using Javascript code.
If you don’t want to be writing in HTML, then don’t write in HTML – you can use Markdown instead. (For your own entries anyway. In the comment section of another user’s blog, unfortunately, you are reduced to conforming with whatever formatting options the blog’s owner chose for you, which is likely to be the default plain HTML only. (Remember that MT is a (single-user in spirit) blogging system, not originally a community engine.))
]]>As one in MT development team, I'm sorry for your experience with MT. a bit of clarification:
The current license is not open source. it was, but recently we changed the license and the wikipedia article wasn't updated yet. (I just edited it)
Now it is close source, with the source available at github. There is still a lot of confusion in the community what is free and needs commercial license, but it will be resolved over time.
As for the documentation, I don't think that we have a layman guide to MT, only more specialized role-based documentation. (see http://movabletype.org/documentation/)
About timezones - everything have a timezone attached. a user have one and a website have one. so when you view times inside MT's screens, you see it in your local timezone. When the data is published to the website, time is displayed in the website's timezone.
Body vs Extended - sounds like a theme-specific customization. In general we have excerpt - a field that can be filled to set a specific excerpt, or if it is empty, uses the first X words from the body. Extended is not used by default.
tags, categories and keywords - here too, keywords are by default not used.
tags and categories are two ways to arrange and manage entries. both have pros and cons, and MT supports both.
Summery: yes, the usability of MT is not very good, but some of your grips are caused by this specific site customization. which is unfortunate.
]]>Hallelujah! Amen.
(Okay, maybe two things to add ...)
]]>Remember, you can always mark a ticket as spam by clicking the S in the upper right corner - two spam votes (from any RT users) will delete the ticket.
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