Six Apart Doesn't Want Me To Use or Recommend Movable Type (But I Do It Anyway)

Movable Type is for people who either don't care what their blog looks like, can hand code beautiful CSS, or can afford to hire a designer.

Permit me to go over some history here, so the context is clear. I wasn't exactly keeping a paper trail, so corrections are welcome, but I'm confident I have the broad outlines correct.

When I started using MT, I picked a style for my blog. It was blue, and you know I like that. My blog looked better on MT than in its previous digs on Blogger, and it looked fine compared to many other blogs. I made some customizations to my templates as I started to learn more about how the templates and tags worked. I was happy.

When we hit one of the MT version 3s, 6A completely redid the MT templates and styles to make them compatible across MT, LiveJournal, and TypePad. They bragged at the time that there were "dozens" of styles that came with this new and exciting MT, but what they really meant was there were three or four layouts, and a couple of them came in multiple colors, plus there were a few "novelty" themes like knitting and baby and wedding that all looked very similar. I think you could count 25 options total, which is one over 2 dozen and thus they could use the plural. I had been looking forward to the "new" styles even since seeing a comment on another blog by Jay Allen of 6A about how they would be new and improved. Honestly, I was really disappointed. None of them were terribly interesting.

I didn't have to change my existing blogs. But I believed 6A when they told me the new structure was better. We were assured that the pain of converting to the new system was worth it, because now there would be more styles for everyone due to the cross-compatibility with TypePad and LiveJournal. So I dumped my old styles and templates and started over. (To be fair, one of the blogs on my MT installation was not converted to the new templates and styles, and it continued to function just fine. I very much appreciated that 6A hadn't broken it.)

Luckily for me, there was then a Style Contest to encourage development of styles by the MT community. The Style Contest generated a bunch of really creative stuff. You can see one of them here (although it's broken right now, my fault.) You can see one of them (with my modifications) at Heroine Content. You can see one of them at Grace's blog. All three of those blogs look totally different. So the changes I made had paid off, and I was happy.

Side note: I think the reason there was so much attention to styles at that point was that WordPress had crushed MT in a few areas and 6A was trying to catch up. 6A had a bad time with public opinion when they went to a paid model for MT, and they didn't have Pages like WP, and there was this massive user base in WP (because it's free and people like free even when they don't give a flip about open source philosophy) and the sheer number of users meant that people were creating styles left and right. Were many of them ugly and broken? Yes. But MT didn't even have any.

The MT styles did get a little more difficult to work with, because 6A made it so that every element is wrapped in three thingamabobs so that designers have enough "handles" to attach CSS to. That's a terrible explanation, but if you understand CSS then you should know what I'm getting at, and if you don't then don't worry about it. Suffice it to say, the stylesheet had more gunk in it, but I accepted that was necessary, and I did manage to figure it out.

It was also cool when the StyleCatcher plugin came along, and it was finally possible to switch styles easily. So hey, progress. The Style Contest got converted to the Style Archive, with the expectation that new themes would continue to be developed, and that was also inspiring.

At some point I started seeing rumors of MT4, and I saw that it would include Pages, and I'm thinking "Finally! Were catching up to WP!" I had thought the upheaval within the MT3s would be a big one, and MT4 would basically just add new features like Pages and improve performance.

Ha.

With MT4, it is once again goodbye old styles, hello new styles. Four styles (hills, minimalist, cityscape, and unity) and they each come in several different colors. The templates have been completely re-done yet again. The official advice from 6A is to re-do your blog so you can take advantage of the new features.

Oh, and that promise that the template compatibility with LJ and Typepad would mean
more styles for everyone? Never saw that happen, except that all the MT4 styles are lifted from those other services, meaning that a MT blog using one of the default styles will look just like a LJ/Typepad/Vox blog.

The old MT3 styles now can't be used on a MT4 template. I guess it's a good thing no one made more than a handful of additional themes for the Style Library! That's right, the attempt to jump-start theme development among MT users had gone bonk, whereas WordPress people have continued to churn out themes as if they will end world hunger. A healthy market has even developed for WP themes, so you can buy better ones if you don't like the free ones. For MT? Not so much.

I wasn't the only one who noticed. The developers at Appnel Solutions said this, emphasis mine:

With the changes made going from the MT 3.x default templates to what shipped with MT4, everything in the MT Style Gallery is broken when applied to default templates in MT4. (I've been mildly surprised there hasn't been more of an uproar -- not like the MT community needs another.) My concern is that without documentation -- and some assurance this isn't going to happen any time soon -- there will few, if any, third-party template sets for users to choose from.

However, 6A reassured me, the good news was that the upgrade would treat all of my templates as sacred. Yes, they do use the word "sacred." Makes you feel safe about upgrading, doesn't it?

Except it's not true.

Post-comment and search result templates are system templates. The default versions replaced my customized versions when I upgraded. My text edits? Gone. My fix to the Heroine Content template that solved the problem of those pages displaying black text on a black background? Gone. Somehow, the ones here are even pulling the wrong image. Honestly, I've been too annoyed to go dig around and fix it.

Well at least 6A provided Page templates, so if you don't want to upgrade your blog, you can still take advantage of the new static pages functionality.

Except they have the wrong tags in them, so they don't work unless you fix them.

The 6A claims about the state of MT style-ing just make me sad. Here's a sample:

Movable Type, TypePad, and Vox provide hundreds of themes and styles ranging from something professional to something intricately elaborate, with many customizable choices in between.

Movable Type provides 4. The Pro Pack provides 1. One guy has ported 3 WP themes (cutline, 2813, hemingway). Another guy has ported 9 additional themes from WP on his own time, but some of the sidebars are busted.

For years now, Movable Type has had a powerful "Style Catcher" built in, which lets you browse a number of different style libraries all over the Internet, and then apply a style to your blog with just a click.

That number would be two. MT's own, and the Style Archive. Unless I somehow completely missed a cache of MT styles for several years.

6A created the Design Assistant so you can "knock out a cool custom design really quickly."

If by "custom design" you mean "what you could come up with on your own if you already know how to hand code CSS, but more automated."

6A just held a contest for styles for TypePad, Livejournal, and Vox.

No, I didn't leave out MT. They did.

So who is their target market?

Someone for whom the Design Assistant's instructions make sense: "If you know CSS it's easy to [edit] your own styles." Someone to whom these paragraphs are exciting and not exhausting:

The Assistant creates finished designs, but you're also encouraged to click on individual page elements and understand the CSS cascade that informs their styling. The last step isn't merely when a particular design is applied to your blog -- the last step is actually the start of learning more, from a broad selection of hand-picked learning resources. [...] We know there's an opportunity to get people who are just thinking "I need to pick a theme" to think in the mindset of a designer.

So if I'm the person thinking "I need to pick a theme," I am not Movable Type's target market UNLESS I want the power and control of MT but I don't mind my blog looking just like a LJ/Typepad/Vox blog OR I can hand code CSS to make it beautiful so I don't need 6A to supply styles OR I can hire a designer.

My conclusion is that their target market is corporations and hackers. Those of us who aren't quite hackers are supposed to go use a less powerful tool if what we want is to make our blogs pretty.

Movable Type is for people who don't care very much about accessibility, web standards, or future-proofing.

First, look at the code that results from inserting an image and asking it to be left aligned:


<form mt:asset-id="592" class="mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image" style="display: inline;"><img alt="name" src="aid-box.jpg" width="300" height="200" class="mt-image-left" style="float: left; margin: 0 20px 20px 0;" /></form>


A form, three classes, and an inline style. What the heck do I do with this in the future? What if I want to change blogging software? Luckily I know (kind of) how to use regular expressions and I could fix it if I moved to WordPress or what have you, but do most people know how to do that? Should I have to?

Look at the WordPress code for the same operation:


<img src="aid-box.jpg" alt="fair trade organic cotton fabric" align="left" />


I don't usually give props to WordPress for simplicity, but the difference between the two boggles the mind.

Second, post titles are now h2 on the index pages, and h1 on the individual archive pages. What heading levels am I supposed to use within my posts? Using h3 so it's correct on the index pages means I skip a level on the individual pages. I get why they did this, I really do. It makes more sense than having the blog's name as h1 on every page of your blog. But what am I supposed to do with my posts to maintain good code? Good code is good on its own merits, and it also allows me to style my blog the way I want it - since we have seen that 6A thinks I should be able to do that quite easily.

Third, the Universal Template Set, created by two employees of 6A, has link underlining turned off by default. I can get behind that in navigation. I can let that slide in posts IF AND ONLY IF it's visually easy for everyone to distinguish links from text. The four combinations of text and link color that are available in the Universal Template Set: dark green and black, red and black, dark blue and black. Using dark green and black, I can't even tell where the links are on my own site. I have to mouse over text that I suspect is a link and see whether an underline pops up. Only dark blue and black is reasonable for anyone with impaired red-green color vision, which is a decent chunk of the American male population, and even that could be a challenge for older people who are losing some of their color vision overall.

There is nothing wrong with underlining links. It helps people with visual and cognitive disabilities and people who are new to the web and benefit from consistent navigation strategies. I hate to see 6A encouraging people to go without underlining, particularly with such terrible color combinations and no other link decoration (such as bolding the links).

(Finally, if I weren't tired of writing this post by now, I would be talking about 6A's historical love for visual CAPTCHAs, and how they are now encouraging people to use visual CAPTCHAs on their blogs. At least they have reCAPTCHA as an option, which includes an audio option, but would it really have been that hard to build in a question/response text CAPTCHA option? But since I am tired of writing this post, that is all I will say.)

My conclusion is that their target market is people who just want the image to align and don't care about how it gets there, people who care more about SEO than good code, and people with perfect color vision and eyesight who know that all their readers have the same.

I don't exactly know who that is, but it's not me. I know too much about how things should be to accept this. It's a bunch of shortcuts that privilege getting it to work over getting it right.

I imagine the image alignment is like the rich text editor - included so corporations can have their non-technical people use MT, but it spits out bad code and they don't know or care. Unlike in WP, you can't even switch to viewing the HTML while you're using the rich text editor, so you'll never know anyway.

I still love Movable Type and recommend it.

I think Anil Dash, 6A VP, was right about most of the things he described in A WordPress 2.5 Upgrade Guide where he basically told people to switch to MT instead of upgrading. I wanted to throw up a little when he knocked WP 2.5 for breaking people's plugins, when I had just lost two of my key plugins between MT 3.x and 4.x (Blogroll and Comment Challenge, though the latter has been ably replaced by Akismet, originally developed by WP. Funny, huh?)

But he was right about these four things:

1. In WP, content and presentation are mixed together. That's bad. WordPress is written in PHP which looks and acts like the alphabet threw up in a blender and makes me want to scratch my eyes out with a pen if I need to make any template modifications. I did one WordPress install and I thought C-Man was going to divorce me when we tried to make it spit out a list of all the pages sorted in a certain way that should have been easy. What Dash says about this:

We have a strong belief that creating a theme or editing a design shouldn't require knowing PHP or figuring out whether parameters go in the order of "format, before, after" or "before, after, format".

Hallelujah, Mr. Dash.

2. StyleCatcher makes switching styles easy. (If there are any.)

3. Paid support is well worth it to me, and MT has a good user community just like WP that presents another avenue for getting help.

4. MT easily supports multiple blogs. I have 10.

Beyond specific it-does-this or it-does-that reasons, MT is just amazingly POWERFUL. It can't leap small buildings with a single bound, and it doesn't wear a cape, but it can do everything I want it to do. I can't do it justice in this post. It's a serious piece of software. I really do believe that it's better than WordPress, and that for self-hosted blogs it's the best choice out there.

Maybe that's why they don't want me. I'm not a serious hacker, and I'm not running a company whose life depends on its website. And honestly, I'm sure it doesn't make a difference to their business success whether people like me are using MT. I paid for a license gladly before MT went open source, and I'll do it again when I need to, but my few hundred dollars every few years can't make that much difference to them. So like the widget people, I can understand why they're not making it the way I want it.

But it sucks for me.