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The Plugin Rule

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I got caught up in a discussion on plugins for WordPress today, which got me thinking about some things that I really should share with the Devlounge readership. It might seem a trifle basic to some of you, but you should understand that there are a lot of people who extend and further extend their websites with plugins, widgets, gadgets, gizmos, addons, extensions, or whatever they are called for their publishing platform, and by doing so really just make the visitor’s experience worse.

So what am I talking about, really?

Plugin Overload

Sometimes you stumble over a cool feature that someone has on his or her website. You want it for your own, or your client wants it for their site. Googling it will find a solution, of course, and it might be a plugin for the CMS you’re using.

Excellent! Install! Blam! It’s up!

Then it happens again. And again. It goes on and on, and suddenly you have 20+ plugins installed, and you’re wondering why the reader stats are going down.

The ease of adding plugins makes us sometime forget 5 things:

  1. Extending the CMS with plugins might strain it more.
  2. Additional functionality usually means additional database queries, calls to scripting actions, or whatever.
  3. Widgets hosted on a different server can hog up a site, just because the server they are on isn’t responding properly.
  4. Too many things at once might clash, because the developers didn’t take everything into consideration.
  5. Cramming too many features in one place will most likely make it cluttered and unfocused.

It is very easy to just download a plugin and extend our CMS today. A lot of times that is a good thing, but sometimes it goes too far. There really is no telling how well two different plugins will work together. A lot work perfectly well, but some might clash due to poor programming or coincidence. After all, there is no way that the developer can test his work with everything out there, now is there?

There’s also the matter of load times. First of all, the more you put on a site, the bigger it will get and the slower it will load. This is less of an issue today, with high speed internet access, but it is still an issue. Second, if you use external services, like Share This or Disqus for instance, you will have to wait for them before you can use their functionality. If they are implemented right, the rest of the site will load, but that is not always the case. Third, people are impatient, high speed internet access or not – they want everything to happen the moment they click. So when someone finds a link to your Kick Ass Super Duper Post Of Brilliance, clicks in anticipation of reading something genius, and then it loads slooowly, you might just have lost a faithful reader.

Finally, there is something called two many features as well. Do you really need everything you clutter your site with? Just browsing the blogosphere tells me that the case is usually “probably not”…

The Plugin Rule

So what can you do? I have something I call the Plugin Rule. Basically, it goes something like this:

Never add a plugin for a feature your CMS can do with a little bit of custom coding.

Now, there’s the issue of actually doing that custom coding as well. Let’s say you’re running a WordPress blog and want a submit to Reddit link. You could do that with Share This, with one of the numerous plugins, or you could hack the theme template and add the submit link there. The ideal solution is the last one, since it relies on no plugins nor external services, but not everyone is capable of doing that. They should, of course, choose a plugin that gets the job done. That is, if they really need the feature – otherwise just forget about it.

It all boils down to your level of expertise of course, but try and avoid using plugins for everything. Always search for a less obtrusive solution. And perhaps most important of all: Always question the need of the added functionality. After all, less is sometimes actually more.

Things to Consider When Using Movable Type as a CMS

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Thord’s post on using WordPress as a CMS got me to thinking about all the times I’ve used Movable Type for that purpose. I use MT for the same reason he uses WP — I know it well enough I can make it do anything I want. It also helps that Six Apart has been steadily adding more CMS features.

So what do you need to know if you’re going to use MT as your CMS? Thord’s article covered a lot of things that should be considered when selecting any CMS software, so I’m going to concentrate on some of the pros, cons, and quirks involved in working with MT.

Pros

  • Templating – MT’s templating system really does let you publish your data in any way you want. Depending on the needs of your website, you can setup MT to generate anything from a simple web page to a complex CSV file to a proprietary feed format. For many things you don’t need a plugin, you just need to know the structure of the final output. One practical example is creating an email newsletter from your recent blog posts. I once created a template that included excerpts from recent blog posts in a format that could be fed directly to sendmail (or some other mail transfer agent) to send to my subscribers. Worked great, and made it easy to reuse my blog content.
  • Custom Fields – Custom fields in MT are very powerful, and easy to create. “Blog entries” can have fields appropriate to the actual content, such as an address field for an event or a rating field for a movie review.
  • Multiple blogs – It’s easy to setup multiple blogs so that each can maintain a different section of a site. You might want one blog for your photo gallery and another for your product catalog, for example. And, both can make use of global templates, so you don’t have to duplicate work.
  • Roles – MT gives you fine-grained access control over what users can do. This allows you to setup a hierarchy of authors, editors, designers, and admins that control different aspects of the site.
  • Custom App – The application itself is built using the same templating system used for blog templates, so you can customize the interface. You could do anything from replacing the header with your client’s logo to completely reskinning the admin to match their site.

Cons

  • Publishing – Movable Type’s concept of publishing — and republishing everything when you make a design change — can be difficult for users. Static publishing does not give you quite the same instant gratification that dynamic publishing does.
  • Plugins – There are a lot of great MT plugins, but the development community is small when compared to Drupal or WordPress. There’s also very few “big feature” plugins. If you’re looking for ecommerce or event calendar plugins, you’re not going to find them.
  • Themes – As with plugins, the variety of MT themes is rather limited.
  • Image uploads – Tying images or other files to a page or post is still complicated. Plugins help, but it could be easier.

Quirks

  • Templating – At this point, the templating system is almost its own programming language, which may put off some designers. And if you do something wrong, the error message can be difficult to interpret.
  • Organizing – Organizing an MT-based site takes some advanced planning. Can you arrange a single blog the way you want with categories and tags, or do you need to use multiple blogs to control the site? If you change your mind later on, it’s not going to be an easy switch.
  • Multiple Domains – It is possible for MT to power multiple domains from a single install, but setting it up properly takes some work. If you’re considering doing this, you might want to read how I got my system working.

Which software you choose for your CMS depends largely on your needs and what you’re familiar with. Personally, when I consider what software to use to run a website, my first question is, “How easy will it be for me to customize this?” In that regard, MT has met my needs for a lot of projects.

Have you ever used MT as a CMS? Tell us about your experience in the comments.

Finding Harmony Between Categories and Tags on Blogs

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With the emerging of tags, and I’m not talking about Technorati tags here but tags as a part of your own blog, categories can become redundant. A lot of blogs out there has got a bunch of categories, and with the addition of tags, they suddenly have duplicates of everything. Or perhaps they have a lot of categories, because the categories have been used as tags, basically, which perhaps was a great idea back then, but today is totally unnecessary.

Finding a balance between categories and tags might not be as easy, nor as obvious, as one would like to think.

The Ideal Category/Tag Setup

In my opinion, categories and tags are two completely different things. Mind you, I’m tackling this issue as both a designer and a publisher. The ideal setup for your particular fancy or site might be something completely different, there’s the whole matter of what you need and want as well, of course.

I define categories and tags like this:

  • Categories are main sections of the site. If you’ve got an entertainment blog, “music” might be one category, and “movies” another, but no more niched than that.
  • Tags are descriptions of post content. This means that if you’ve got a post in that “music” category, it might be tagged “metal” because that’s the genre, and “Alice Cooper” because that’s the artist.

The benefits of this way to look at categories and tags, is that categories can be treated as true sections of your site. Most blogging platforms support category specific styling, so that music category can have a cool guitar at top, or use a special color, or whatever. The point is that you can style a specific category in a fitting way, making it more obvious that it is one of the (few) main sections of your blog.

It might take some time to apply a more sound use of categories on your blog, but defining your sections is a good thing.

Tags, on the other hand, are like a loose search query. The point isn’t to style everything tagged “Alice Cooper” in a specific way, since it might be posts from completely diverse areas (i.e. different categories), but rather to list everything relevant.

Applying This

The Blog Herald had a gadzillion tags before its redesign. Since it uses WordPress, I used the included script to convert categories to tags, and then sorted the content in more relevant categories, like news and features, and so on. It might take some time to apply a more sound use of categories on your blog, but defining your sections is a good thing.

If you’re using a blog platform as a CMS (something I’ve touched before), using categories as main sections of your site makes even more sense. After all, you’ve got your menu right there, in the categories, and you’ll be using the blog platform as it is meant to be used, the only difference is that you’ll style the various categories a bit more elaborately than you might have for a traditional blog.

What are your thoughts on how to use categories and tags on a blog? Share your thoughts in the comments!

MT 4.2 Brings New Features, Some Gotchas

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Movable Type 4.2 came out about two weeks ago, and since then I’ve been poring over the documentation to learn about the new features in this release. There’s a lot here for developers and designers to enjoy. Things like social networking, improved templates, and better performance make upgrading an easy decision. Let’s look at some of the new things we have to play with.

Community Features

The MT Community Solution was first introduced over a year ago. With 4.2, that feature is expanded and, possibly more importantly, now free for non-business users. Your blog can include forums, ratings, user profiles, and more.

What makes me excited about this is the combination of a full suite of social networking features with MT’s powerful templating system. Designers can break out of the standard forum look to develop new (and hopefully better) user interfaces.

New Default Templates

Although the modularity of the default templates in 4.0 simplified site-wide changes, many developers found them too complicated. The 4.2 templates attempt to correct this. The line-upon-line of <mt:setvar> tags that started many of the templates are now gone. There’s also far fewer includes. These new templates should be easier to modify for people new to MT.

Template Module Caching & Server Side Includes

The results of template modules can be cached so they don’t have to be recreated every time you publish. This is great for sidebar content that doesn’t change with each entry you create. Combined with the new settings for Server Side Includes, this should be a powerful replacement for my optimal includes.

Custom Fields

Custom fields is another feature that’s been around a while, but with 4.2 it becomes available to more people through the free blogger license. This is huge for people using MT as a CMS. MT’s custom fields are particularly nice, because each type of field you can create comes with its own set of template tags.

Pagination for Dynamic Publishing

Any dynamically-published template can be paginated. This feature is not a part of the default templates, but the implementation is very simple. This goes hand-in-hand with new options that give you more control over how each template is published.

…and many more changes, both large and small. Over the next few weeks I’ll be exploring these new features more and giving you new and interesting ways to use them.

Notes for Upgraders

Since the initial release, a couple of changes have come to light that you should know about if you’re upgrading an existing blog. First, because of a change in how per-template publishing is handled, any index template you had set not to publish automatically will now be set to publish. You’ll need to go into each one and change the Publishing option to Manually.

Also, the dirify modifier no longer strips out hyphens. If you have a custom archive path that uses dirify (e.g. <mt:entrytitle dirify="1">.php), it would change where some files get published. On the ProNet mailing list, this work-around was offered:

[html]

[/html]

It’s likely this change will either be reversed or someone will release a plugin that makes dirify work the way it used to.

Have you tried MT 4.2 yet? What are your favorite new features?

CMS List

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With all the content management systems out there (CMS), it’s very hard to pick the perfect one to run your blog or project on. This question frequently comes out everywhere I go: “Which CMS Should I use in this situation?” There are thousands of CMS systems out there – some self-hosted, and some hosted for you. While we can not cover them all, I’ve rounded up a few of my favorites, based on past experience, what I’ve heard from others, and which ones seems to show the most promise, and broken down some of the essential features for you to have a look at all in one glance, for a nice, quick comparison.

Self-Hosted Solutions

Wordpress

WordPress – Free/Open Source (PHP)
Key Features: Standards Compliant, automatic feed generator for almost everything, comments, user registration, mass amount of themes and plugins, bookmark and link management.

My Experience: In the past year, WordPress went from a script I would use from time to time, to a cms I put to use in all my client work when some form of content management is required. I find WordPress to have an extremely helpful community behind it, with more and more extensions constantly being created, and a (very) frequent update schedule.

Movabletype

Movabletype – Free/Paid Licenses (CGI)
Key Features: Multiple database support, activity feeds, spam protection, extensive plugin and theme lists.

My Experience: Before becoming such a huge WordPress fan, I was very much into Sixapart’s Movabletype. That began to fade out a bit when they introduced pricing schemes and limited what you could do with the Personal (free) edition. Still, I really liked the admin end of MT, and found it just as easy as WP to use. Since the last time I used MT, they have added a host of new features, which are worth checking out. Just be aware of the pricing scheme, and make sure you know the limitations of the Personal edition before you try to do to much with it. MT also uses cgi scripts for the backend and can run on multiple types of databases.

Expression Engine

Expression Engine – Free/Paid Licenses (PHP)
Key Features: Built in mailing list and manager, comments, captcha, built in hit tracking, multi user system, member groups, robust template system, decent amount of plugins available.

My Experience: The last time I used Expression Engine, it was called pmachine. Yes, it has been a while, and it appears that EE has added a ton of extra features, not to mention an update backend design. I have heard a lot of people sign praise for EE, the only problem is that features are limited in the free license version.

Textpattern

Textpattern – Free (PHP)
Key Features: Unlimited site sections, browser based file upload, built in search engine, xml feeds, unlimited site authors, multiple languages.

My Experience: Textpattern is very similar to WordPress, even the admin backend. If your contemplating between using TP and WordPress, the better choice would be WordPress due to its much more frequently updated release schedule, and its extended plugin availability.

Simplelog

Simplelog – Free (Ruby on Rails)
Key Features: Elegant administration interface, tagging, comments with spam protection, quick search with boolean logic, multiple author support, automatic pinging to Ping-o-matic, RSS 2.0 feeds, permalinks.

Radiant

Radiant – Free/Open Source (Ruby on Rails)
Key Features: Fast loading, simple admin interface, custom template language, flexible site structure, page caching, custom text filters.

My advice: Although I’ve never used Radiant (besides the demo), it looks very nice and very simple to use. We had originally planned on using it to run Devlounge, although it was still very new at the time so we didn’t go through with it. If you’re looking for a RoR cms, it’d be wise to give this a look.

Mephisto

Mephisto – Free/Open Source (Ruby on Rails)
Key Features: Mephisto is the WordPress for Ruby on Rails. Theme uploading and editing, “overview” feed, asset manager, multiple authors, great looking backend design.

My Thoughts: Mephisto looks very promising. It even recently got long time WordPress user (and past Devlounge interviewee) Steve Smith to move his entire blog and site over. I think throughout the rest of the year, Mephisto will continue to develop the product as more big-namers make the switch.

Symphony

Symphony – Free (PHP)
Key Features: Modular system, XSLT template system, clean url structure, clean admin interface.

My Experience: Symphony looks like a nice system. I first heard about almost a year ago, but at the time, it was only a paid download. Since then, Symphony has become free. Because it uses an XSLT template engine, it make time some time to adjust to if you’re used to using PHP and Smarty templating engines.

Drupal

Drupal – Free/Open Source (PHP)
Key Features: Clean urls, expandable modules, personalization, searching, polls, multiple users, threaded comments, built in news aggregator, caching, and nice collection of themes already available.

To see many of these cms systems and more in live demos, visit O.S.C..

Hosted Solutions

Metacanvas

Metacanvas – Paid
Key Features: Clean url, file manager, database driven with backups, all content is indexed and fully searchable, fully managed and hosted for you, automatic updates, standards compliant.

Pagety

Pagety – Free/Paid
Key Features: Super simple administration, easily and quickly management multiple parts of your site, add and create custom forms, template system, manage all your sites from one place.

My Experience: I recently played around with Pagety a little bit, and while it is true, it’s very simple, you can do a lot with it. Hosting is included, and there is a free plan available, so give it a try if you’re looking for a web based, hosted solution.

Got a favorite we should I add? Please let us know in the comments so we can keep the list fresh. With so many CMS choices out there, we can’t list them all, so we’re trying to list our favorites and the ones with the best promise.

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