dekstop: weblog

I'm on constant lookout for a better system to maintain this website -- currently it's a rather loose mixture of MovableType 2.6.x, custom PHP, and individual HTML pages, and it really shows. There is more inconsistency that I would like to have, and it is not easy to maintain -- every change to the layout requires modifying several template files, and modifying twice as many HTML files. Add to this the fact that some pages require different layouts (which sometimes involves custom style sheets). In short, it's a mess.

I'd like to have an integrated solution, and it wouldn't hurt if I had to code less and could still maintain the same flexibility, but there seems to be no perfect solution. I'm definitely not willing to install a complete CMS like Typo3 or Zope; these are more flexible, but involve too much work. And most of those full-fledged CMSs are really, really ugly. I rather like the solutions that have come out of the blogger "scene" -- I loved MovableType for the simplicity and design when I started using it, and currently WordPress and TextPattern look really interesting, and their interfaces and documentation are mostly beautiful. But I'm not sure if they can be flexible enough -- after all, this blog is only one part of the whole site.

One required feature: I need to have the flexibility to add individual pages outside the weblog that can also have a different layout than the rest, maybe even competely different HTML code, but that are still part of the CMS, and that don't require me to build a custom page template just for this single page.

MovableType 2.x certainly does not provide this feature. (I havent looked at newer versions since their license changed with the last big version jump). WordPress has a concept of individual "pages" that are not part of a timeline, but these are also template-based. WordPress is still targeted towards weblogs.

TextPattern looks like a good contender, and it has interesting CMS features that make it quite flexible; but TextPattern has another problem: it messes with your URLs. It basically changes the behavior of the web server.

I just found this by surfing Jon Hick's site, and I will use his site to give you an example -- I hope he doesn't mind. (He is using TextPattern for the whole site, and he is certainly using it for more than his blog, so his site is a good entry point to watch TextPattern at work.)

Go to any random entry in his journal, e.g. his last one: http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/journal/rss-feed-problems. If you look at this URL you can see that TextPattern does make it possible to define clean URLs that do not contain article IDs, script names etc. But at the same time the URL handling mechanism is deeply flawed, which you can see when you arbitrarily modify the last part of the URL; e.g., delete the last character of the URL which changes it to http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/journal/rss-feed-problem, and then load the page -- it doesn't give you an error, but loads the journal index instead!

What happened to returning HTTP errors? What's wrong with good old 404? Maybe I'm overreacting, but this alone makes TextPattern unusable to me. You need to give an error if someone requests a wrong URL. It's one thing to try to correct a user error, but it's another to silently ignore broken input and simply show the default page. And how can you now keep track of broken links?

This can not only be seen on Jon's page, you can try it on any TextPattern-driven site. It's actually a well-known property of TextPattern, and there is at least one plugin that helps you fix some of the side-effects; but this introduces a potential list of additional issues, and besides, I don't want a plugin to remove a feature from the software that shouldn't really be there in the first place. This needs to be fixed, and until then I'll probably cope with MovableType 2.x and code the rest by hand.