Movable Type questions

6 Comments

Hi, all—Movable Type (journaling) neepery here; if you're not interested, skip this.

I'm once again considering moving my journal to MT. I installed the latest version a week or two ago and played around with various aspects of it (I'll post a link to my installation at some point, but it's not ready for that yet), and I still have a few questions. I'm hoping y'all who've used it can suggest some answers.

Most of these are probably things I could find out on my own, but I'm short on time today, so figured if some of y'all could point me to answers, that'd be great.

  • I really want my main page to show the last n entries rather than the last n days' worth of entries. I haven't learned enough of MT's template language yet to know whether that's feasible. Anyone? You don't need to write the code for me; just let me know if it's doable. (And if the code is out there somewhere, feel free to point me to it.) I won't be showing full text of entries on main page; I'll either do a main page much like my current one (only prettier), with just the titles and dates, or a main page kind of like the SH table of contents, with titles and pull quotes (and dates).
  • I also really want my main page to show the last n comments posted, the way my current one does in the sidebar. I currently do that with some tricky MySQL code that someone provided for me. Can I insert direct MySQL and PHP code in the MT template, bypassing their template language? (I don't suppose their template language has last-n-comments-posted built in?) I assume I would have to do things like make the filename extension ".php", but that's fine with me.
  • I read somewhere that with MT you can set individual old entries (or maybe all entries older than a certain age?) to have moderated comments. I like that idea; is it true?
  • Various of y'all have various anti-comment-spam solutions; do any of them not send email to the blog owner when spammers try to post? A concern has been raised that although MT might reduce the amount of posted comment spam, it might increase the amount of comment-spam-notification email we would have to deal with.
  • I was pretty sure I didn't want to go with WordPress; the main advantage people have cited of WP over MT is that WP is free (and/or open source?) software, which doesn't make so much difference to me. But is WP better? I'm not sure. I've also heard good things about blosxom. I need to look in more detail at the Blog Software Breakdown chart (which is actually a comparison chart, but I keep thinking from the title that it's about blog software failing to work).

Gotta run.

6 Responses to “Movable Type questions”

  1. JeremyT

    Yes to your first question.

    Yes to your second. I have php includes on my template. If your server knows to parse .html files for php code, then you don’t ened to change extensions.

    There are plugins to turn off comments on entries over a certain age, and you can set whether comments are open or closed on each entry.

    I don’t get comment spam anymore myself, because I have a tendency of closing comments on all posts over a week old with a plug-in script.

    I’m still using Movable Type 2.51 though because I haven’t felt like paying the licenses for 3.

  2. Benjamin Rosenbaum

    I too am still on MT 2.x.

    I made my own spam comment solution. I like it a lot. It does not mail me when spammers try to post, it only mails me when they MANAGE to post, and this is quite rare. And then I can easily delete howevermany posts they managed in one page, and ban their IP address; this has worked well.

    There may actually be a way in the template language to get your last-n-comments thing without any PHP/mysql. But I also mix PHP and MT templates freely. The MT tag parsing happens at rebuild-time; if that produces PHP pages, they are then parsed in their turn at page-serving-time.

  3. meriko

    1. Yep.
    2. MT’s markup lets you do this. No need for tricky PHP. (gastronome does this.)
    3. dunno.
    4. I use MTblacklist, which mails when something isn’t automatically caught, or when something has posted wayyyy too much toooo fast. But I have all comments mailed to me anyway from my journal, so I don’t mind, and appreciate the handy clickthrough to ban IP/urls.
    5. I don’t know nuthin’ about wordpress. I’ve been on MT for years.

  4. Wendy

    On question #3, a plain vanilla MT installation doesn’t do this, but there are multiple plugins available that allow you to close and/or moderate comments on older posts. Recent versions of MT-Blacklist have settings to do this, though I can’t speak to how well they work, because I already moderate all comments on danielstarr.com except for Typekey authenticated ones. There is also at least one specialized plugin for managing comments on older posts – check out the plugins directory over at SixApart’s website, and it shouldn’t be too hard to find.

    On notifications, MT-Blacklist allows you turn off notifications. Currently, I have them on, and it only seems to e-mail me for trackbacks that are “moderated” rather than blocked outright. I’m still debating whether to turn notifications off or not. (I’ve been running MT-Blacklist for less than 24 hours, so I can’t claim to be expert on it. So far, though, it’s doing a great job.)

    Don’t really know much about WordPress. I have a strong impression that WordPress and MT have worked hard to keep up with each other’s feature sets, so there’s not much that one can do that the other can’t, but there are underlying philosophical and technical differences. My understanding on WordPress is that it uses a lot of actual PHP or PHP-like syntax in putting things together. That made it less attractive to me, because I don’t know PHP. (Yet. I’ll learn it eventually.) On the other hand, if you’re already comfortable with PHP, that might make WordPress more attractive.

  5. David Moles

    <MTEntries lastn=”10″> gets you the last 10 entries, most recent first.

    <MTComments lastn=”10″ sort_order=”descend”> gets you the last ten comments, most recent first.

    I’m pretty sure you can do moderated comments with the most recent versions of MT, though not with the old one I’m using.

  6. Stephanie

    WordPress is just… different. I think its templates are a little less flexible, and its archiving scheme leaves a lot to be desired. You can work around those things with plugins and PHP, but it takes more hackery than I’d really like to be dealing with. On the other hand, I’ve had almost no spam problems with WP, and I was getting hammered when I was using MT, even with blacklist and old comments closed and so forth.

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