As you may remember, I use MarsEdit to compose posts, and Movable Type to publish them. I’ve just upgraded to the most recent versions of each. Unfortunately, there seem to be some incompatibilities that are not making me incredibly happy.
For one thing, when I want to choose the text format for a post, I get these options:
That doesn’t look quite right. For another, Movable Type 4 supports entering tags for posts, but I can’t find a way to enter tags within MarsEdit.
That said, I’m generally really fond of both upgrades. Both Movable Type 4 and MarsEdit 2 offer vastly improved support for embedding images in blog posts. What that means is that you’ll probably see more images used around these parts.
The way templates are handled in Movable Type 4 is really impressive. I haven’t dug in completely yet, but the templating system seems more intuitive than ever. More like a real content management system and much more flexible in enabling users to build pages out of components.
The one big Movable Type problem that continues in version 4 is poor performance, especially on the back end. Movable Type remains a CGI application, which really is sort of quaint. That said, I installed FastCGI and am using it to speed up Movable Type. The difference is noticeable.
I’m still ironing out the kinks and I haven’t even started messing with the design, but overall I think this upgrade is going to wind up working out very well.
September 5, 2007 at 12:55 am
Hi Rafe – I’m glad to hear that you’re generally pleased with MarsEdit. The yucky text filter popup you discovered is a known bug in MT 4 and apparently it’s fixed for 4.0.1
http://www.movabletype.org/beta/
(Search on 56352 to see the bug summary)
As for the native tags support – this is something I really wanted to finish for 2.0 but I wasn’t able to. I decided it was better to get 2.0 out and let people start using it, rather than hold up the release. I’m gonna get to work on that though and hopefully have something in the not-too-distant future.
Let me know if you run into any other issues!
Daniel
September 5, 2007 at 1:50 am
This made me smile: Movable Type remains a CGI application, which really is sort of quaint.
I switched from MT three+ years ago and I am really surprised to see that it’s still a CGI-based app. I found the performance to be awful and I could never understand the buzz around hacking and extending it when it seemed so badly in need of basic core re-working. I can even recall trying in vain to get some more performance out of it with mod_perl (I don’t know if FastCGI was supported then). Nothing doing.
But then, if I’m so smart, why haven’t I sold a product i cooked in my back bedroom for several million dollars? [sigh]
If you get tired of it, WordPress offers a pretty compelling alternative.
September 8, 2007 at 4:12 pm
What else would it be? All Rails and Django apps use FastCGI too; without that, they all run as CGI as well. Or they require options that are more work to get going… not much unlike mod_perl.
How’s that quaint?
October 11, 2007 at 3:51 pm
I am having trouble getting Mars Edit to connect to our Moveable Type 4 blog. Any tips?