Movable Type 5 Impressions
It seemed like forever between the time MT5 was released in Japan at the end of November until it was just released in the U.S. We found out the day after, because of a security update to both MT 4.33 and MT 5, but they wouldn't tell us that.
Telling us it was due to "wanting more time for coordination of the release and associated documentation" was frankly bull shit. Sorry guys. There still is hardly any documentation, scouring FogBugz seems to have offered the best loot so far. MT5 was released 4 days ago, and I still cannot lookup information on mt:Websites tag or the parent/child/sibling modifiers, for example. The mt:BlogParentWebsite is another tag I would like to know more about, too.
Come on guys, I thought you were putting a big effort into developing better documentation.
I have been testing out the betas of MT5 for a while now, so am well aware of the major differences between MT4. I know that we cannot use MT5 right away for BG Views Network, as we rely on a great number of plugins and even features not yet in MT5. Actions and Motion are not part of MT5 (yet) for example.
Below is a list of what I like and don't like about what I have experienced with the final build. Now I am fully aware that some nut job is going to take my words and twist them around for personal gains, it happened before after all. Little piece of advice - don't be that nut job. I use the tool that is the best for the job at hand, that happens to be Movable Type.
Liked
Didn't Like
I will keep this updated as I spend more and more time with the final version. Last updated 1/9/2010.
Telling us it was due to "wanting more time for coordination of the release and associated documentation" was frankly bull shit. Sorry guys. There still is hardly any documentation, scouring FogBugz seems to have offered the best loot so far. MT5 was released 4 days ago, and I still cannot lookup information on mt:Websites tag or the parent/child/sibling modifiers, for example. The mt:BlogParentWebsite is another tag I would like to know more about, too.
Come on guys, I thought you were putting a big effort into developing better documentation.
I have been testing out the betas of MT5 for a while now, so am well aware of the major differences between MT4. I know that we cannot use MT5 right away for BG Views Network, as we rely on a great number of plugins and even features not yet in MT5. Actions and Motion are not part of MT5 (yet) for example.
Below is a list of what I like and don't like about what I have experienced with the final build. Now I am fully aware that some nut job is going to take my words and twist them around for personal gains, it happened before after all. Little piece of advice - don't be that nut job. I use the tool that is the best for the job at hand, that happens to be Movable Type.
Liked
- New Website object is long overdue. It is a game changer for organization and coding alike.
- Custom Fields for every object in the system, including Website, Blog, and Template. Blog level custom fields should have been there from the get-go in MT4. Setting custom fields on templates is also a time saver.
- Revision history on everything. This is most welcome for template changes.
- Batch Edit Entries, which was missing from the betas, is now back, thankfully!
- They have made it very clear how entries/categories and pages/folders work together. Nothing has changed, it is just a much nicer way of displaying them.
- Themes are an enormous update from template sets in MT4. I just wish there was better documentation on them so I did not have to reverse engineer the built in themes to develop an MT5 BG Views theme.
- Assigning a sub-domain to a blog publish and document root is now easier than ever. It is a small tweak, but it is nice.
- New Tool: Export Theme, which currently seems like the best option for designing your own theme. So there is no need for another TemplateExporter version.
- While the Community template set still doesn't use the Facebook namespace by default, they have done a good job at restructuring some of the template modules, making them global instead of local.
Didn't Like
- Would it have been that difficult to add Heading tags to the default Rich Text Editor? I know I can install others, but would it really have been too much to ask for a drop down menu of H tags?
- Along the same lines, how about being able to toggle the window full screen for template editing? Yes, it is a bigger window, but the toggle would have been nice.
- MT5 desperately needs a "Blog Mover" Tool at the System Overview level, especially because of the way MT4 is imported into MT5. This should not be that difficult to create, all the tool needs to do is offer a UI to manipulate the publishing and document root path of the blog.
- We need a "Works with MT5" tag, or wiki page, or something started, that indicates what plugins work and do not work in MT5. This was done with MT4 and was very helpful.
- Websites can only have pages, not entries. This is nice. But it is overly complicated when you just want a simple blog. Every Blog must be under a Website, and importing MT4 will produce just that, every blog inside its own Website.
- I figured that MT5 would see the inclusion of native search support for Custom Fields. Currently the 3rd party CustomFieldSearch is the only solution for this.
I will keep this updated as I spend more and more time with the final version. Last updated 1/9/2010.
"Telling us it was due to "wanting more time for coordination of the release and associated documentation" was frankly bull shit. Sorry guys. There still is hardly any documentation, scouring FogBugz seems to have offered the best loot so far. MT5 was released 4 days ago, and I still cannot lookup information on mt:Websites tag or the parent/child/sibling modifiers, for example. The mt:BlogParentWebsite is another tag I would like to know more about, too."
It was actually not "frankly bull shit" - we discovered the security vulnerabilities in December, after we decided to delay the launch. Beau has been working on the documentation - if you file bugs for the missing sections, we can escalate filling those out.
I'm surprised to hear you say that the documentation is overall missing. It's by far the most documentation we've ever shipped with a version of MT! All of the documentation for MT 2,3,4 came later than initial release. This was the first release where we held a pretty firm line about *not* releasing code until more documentation (esp. developer examples and custom field examples).
It may well not be BS, but any product, whatever the company, is going to get looked at differently after having so many delays and not being told why.
I fully understand that telling people there is a security fix before releasing the patch is not an option, but one solution might have been to tell us that 5.01 was going to be the initial MT5 release for the U.S., and that has taken some time.
On the MT5 documentation page I see a large section on upgrading (and that is great) but don't see anything on mt:Websites or mt:BlogParentWebsite, let alone examples. mt:MultiBlog supports new attributes too.
I would not have caught this stuff until much later but Gautam posted about it on the forums.
I think Beau has been doing a great job of beefing up the docs, especially in offering more and better real-world examples.
What other tags/attributes are new to MT5 other than mt:Websites and mt:BlogParentWebsite. I am sure there is much more I don't know about that Six Apart will be providing answers to in the future.