Movable Type Goes Paid
More or less, at any rate. As you all know, I've been beta-testing the new version of Movable Type; the software that runs the news system on G&T. The first version of MT3 was finally publically released yesterday. And we have a problem.
Before now, MT was free for personal use; commercial users still had to pay a fee. Whilst MT3 has a free version, the license now doesn't allow you to have more than one author and three weblogs. Having a "commitment to a free version" (as told in this post in Mena's Corner) is all very well, but as you will have noticed, G&T has two people at the h-hheeelm. I'll say that again, to make it sound like English. And this is forgetting the fact that the current system also runs three other sites; four blogs, and three authors. Meaning I'd have to pay the grand sum of $119.95.
Now, unlike certain other people, I don't begrudge Six Apart the money. They've put a lot of effort into the software. And it is their software; they can do what they like with it. But on the other hand, G&T is not a money-making enterprise; and there are plenty of other free tools out there anyway, which I'd rather use. See the comments on this blog entry for some of them. (The ethos of free software is good; and it can and does work in practice, when there are enough people developing it.) And all this "commitment to a free version" seems rather disingenuous when the license is so restrictive.
It's not just this, mind you; if the software did everything the way I wanted it to, I'd probably just pay up. But recently I've been worrying; I've not been convinced by the way MT3 does things. A Javascript logging in system for registered comments? It seems unpleasant, really; I'd rather not use Javascript unless absolutely forced to, and doing something that there is no other way to do. Logging into a website isn't one of those things. I was going to mention this to the MT people, but I'm not sure it's worth it now.
It's not definitely decided yet, but we may well move to a new system in the future; probably when the site relaunches. I'll be taking 3 days off work in mid-June to do this, so expect it to happen then. In the meantime, I'm investigating other systems. As for comment registration, that won't happen until at least the relaunch now; I just hope I can find a system that does it properly, along with everything else I need it to do...
Meanwhile, it's article writing weekend for me. See you later!
Comments
I moved to WordPress a few months ago, and it was the best thing that happened to my blog. I wrote a How To move from Movable Type to WordPress over at my blog, which might be of interest to you.
WordPress lets me do everything MT did, and the support and user community positively rock!
Posted by Carthik at May 15, 2004 03:05 AM
http://www.sixapart.com/log/2004/05/movable_type_30.shtml
I'm undecided as to what to do, to be honest. It does make things a bit more reasonable (the $10 in particular); if I was completely happy with MT3, I'd probably pay it. But I'm not. Having said that, I can't see anything else that does it better.
Does Wordpress allow registered comments, Carthik?
(I might just have to learn how to write something myself... I've been meaning to do this for ages, and I hardly use any of the advanced features. And I need to learn how to do that kind of thing at some point.)
Posted by John Hoare at May 15, 2004 03:33 PM
Incidentally, I don't have to pay $119.95 - it's $69.95. But I was allowing for future expansion...
Posted by John Hoare at May 15, 2004 05:10 PM
Blogger has become very powerful recently...
(You don't have to host it on their servers either)
Posted by Mr Flibble at May 15, 2004 07:26 PM
You could try to go back to 2.661. There's nothing saying that it's 3.0 or bust.
I qualify for the free version, but I haven't decided if I'll upgrade just yet. The previous version works just fine, and the 'improvements' aren't all that enticing.
Posted by Manda at May 15, 2004 07:27 PM
I would go back to 2.661 (in fact, I probably will do for the time being) - but it's not a solution for registered comments, which I really need.
I think I'm going to write something myself, you know. I don't think there's anything that will do exactly what I want. I'll have a look at Blogger, though - don't know much about it.
Posted by John Hoare at May 15, 2004 07:42 PM
Blogger is hard to set up, and I'm not totally sure it would work for you, but it would be worth a lot.
Posted by Mr Flibble at May 15, 2004 08:19 PM
that should be worth a look
Posted by Mr Flibble at May 15, 2004 08:38 PM
Sorry, too late; see the trackback from my web design blog. I'm gonna try and do it myself. Thanks, though.
Posted by John Hoare at May 15, 2004 09:06 PM
Try here:
http://ask.slashdot.org/askslashdot/03/11/25/2257243.shtml?tid=185
Posted by Codeye at May 28, 2004 11:21 PM
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Movable Gripe
Excerpt: WELL DONE JOHN THAT WAS GOOD. So, Movable Type 3.0 is finally publically released. Hooray. But, as widely discussed, the problem is that the free version now only lets you have one author and three blogs. As my current setup...
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Tracked: May 15, 2004 09:05 PM