RE: [OT] HA without fallback-CBUS --- turned into pros/cons of Movable Type

["Malcolm Surgenor" <malcolm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Many thanks David that's very helpful.  My father's host (Telewest) gives
very little in the way of 'added extras' but I've just realized that my own
host gives a whole load of 'free' stuff in its Fantastico bundle.
B2evolution looks interesting although there are others such as Nucleus,
and
raft of other php based packages there.  I'll have a play when I get some
time.  Thanks.



Malcolm



_____

From: ukha_d@xxxxxxx [mailto:ukha_d@xxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
David Gumbrell
Sent: 18 January 2006 10:42
To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [ukha_d][OT] HA without fallback-CBUS --- turned into
pros/cons
of Movable Type



Hi Malcolm,

In the grand tradition of UKHA threads :-)

I'm reasonably computer literate but not a "webhead", so I wanted
something
with a bit of control, but not too much admin/html/css etc.  Movable Type
is
pretty easy to install and use. To install you have to create a MySQL DB on
your host, configure a couple of parameters in the config file and then FTP
a bunch of stuff to your host.

Once there, it's got a nice control panel and it's very easy to create
(simple) posts etc. If you upload an image it can build the HTML to cut and
paste into your text to get the image embedded (or popup). It's about the
same difficulty level as using a web-base forum to post. The one hassle
I've
had is that my host didn't have image::magick installed, so the automatic
image thumbnailing doesn't work, and I haven't managed to get the
alternative (NetPBM) working either. So all my posts have large embedded
images, which is not good for dial-up readers. You'll note that I haven't
attempted/bothered with any stylistic customisations of MT, so I don't know
how complicated that is to do.

Having said all that ... although Movable Type is currently free for small
blogs (one author), it is not open source, and they upset a lot of people
by
changing the licensing conditions after building up a community of users
(for example, if you wanted your father to author into your site, you may
find you need to pay for that licence). Having done it once, who's to say
when they might do it again.

A mass exodus to WordPress resulted. Many hosts will have an automatic
means
to install WordPress from the control panel, but not MT, due to the
licensing situation. I haven't used Wordpress, so can't comment on ease
etc.

Depending on how you have your hosting sorted and where you want your
father's stuff to appear, you may want to consider either WordPress (open
source and free) instead, or one of the paid blogging services, like
TypePad
or even Blogger (which I think is free). I plan to migrate to WordPress
before I have built up too many posts that will require care to avoid link
breakage.

Hope that helps,

Cheers,
Dave



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