The future of Existential Media

I’ve been lik­ing Mov­able Type less and less lately. A lot of the prob­lems stem from it being writ­ten in perl and per­for­mance issues related to that (I assume). I’ve been look­ing at dif­fer­ent ways to make Exis­ten­tial Media work bet­ter (faster) and be more sta­ble. I’ve done some opti­miz­ing lately of Mov­able Type and my tem­plates (as far as I can with my know-how), but it hasn’t helped ter­ri­bly. I’ve looked at dif­fer­ent hosts and host­ing plans, but there is always cost to con­sider, as well as effort it takes to move to a new host. So in the short term it looks like we are stick­ing with Mov­able Type and Dreamhost.

I’ve started to look at this prob­lem and set long term goals. Although I have learned a lot about Mov­able Type and although it would be a pain to learn a new plat­form, I’ve been “shop­ping” around. I’ve looked at Textpat­tern, which though I like a lot, wouldn’t be good at han­dling some­thing like Exis­ten­tial Media. It works bet­ter to power one site / one blog. Man­ag­ing users and per­mis­sions and blogs seems like it would not be fun. There is also Expres­sio­nEngine, but there is the prob­lem of cost, so that’s a no go. I’m get­ting to the point now. I’ve been heav­ily con­sid­er­ing using Dru­pal. Dru­pal is what is used to power the Onion’s web­site. I installed it and have been tin­kered around with it for a last cou­ple days. So far so good I guess. There is a huge learn­ing curve. It’s a whole new deal. I don’t really know how to come at it just yet. And they focus on being easy on the resources, which is also a good thing. I’ve also looked at Word­press MU, which is what they use to power wordpress.com. It might be exchang­ing one prob­lem for another, but Word­press is very fast and pretty. I’ve more or less decided to go with Word­press (that is, unless Mov­able Type is rewrit­ten in PHP or some­thing). Also, the most recent ver­sion of Word­press was designed by Happy Cog, which is pretty cool.

At first I thought heav­ily about going with Dru­pal, but I decided against it. Although it would work, Dru­pal doesn’t have blog­ging first in mind, it is a full fea­tured CMS. I also was hav­ing trou­ble get­ting to know it. Before I decided against it though, I started writ­ing this post. So I’ve mod­i­fied it. Here is my orig­i­nal game plan for Drupal:

I have to fig­ure out how this all works. I need to “port” my themes over to Dru­pal. I need to move all the data too. There is a Typepad/Movable Type con­ver­tor, but I’m not sure exactly how it will work. There is a list of things I can’t fig­ure out just yet and I thought it would be good to present here.

• Giv­ing a user a blog: I’m a lit­tle con­fused about this. I want it to be like it is now. I give Laura a blog named lady­parts and it has a cer­tain design. And the con­tent does not get inter­mixed with the rest of the site. I’m not really clear how to man­age “blogs” yet. A project that I’ve been look­ing at is Dru­pal MU. This solves the prob­lem of hav­ing a dif­fer­ent theme for each blog. Some­things I’m con­fused about though. Like does the blog name always have to be the same as the user’s? (Like “Laura’s Blog” … existentialmedia.org/laura)
• Hav­ing many users to one blog: I’m not really clear on how this would work. Think­ing about WIWT, how can I have a blog named “What I Wore Today” and have the url (/today) and have dif­fer­ent users post to it? Is this possible?
• I need to fig­ure out how to have a list of the most recent posts on the home­page with the blog col­ors, but that might come once I fig­ure out the other things.

But since we prob­a­bly won’t be using Dru­pal, there is no need to worry any­more about that. Here is why I like Wordpress.

• It is easy to man­age, and although it is very dif­fer­ent than Mov­able Type, I felt at home almost right away. It has the same idea of blogs and users, and try­ing out the import fea­ture it imported all the posts and com­ments on my blog flawlessly.
• I did need to install one plu­gin right away to embed youtube, vimeo, etc which isn’t the most ideal. But was painless.
• Word­press is very fast because it is writ­ten in PHP. I like this part a lot. No more rebuild­ing! I plan on installing one of the caching plu­g­ins too so we shouldn’t have any problems.
• The only rea­son we aren’t there yet is that I have to fig­ure out the tem­plates. It looks to be not that hard, but will take some time. I want to make the tem­plates more eas­ily cus­tomiz­able and this seems pos­si­ble to do with Word­press themes.

Do you have any ques­tions? Fears? Knowl­edge to impart on this sub­ject? I would really like to be in com­mu­ni­ca­tion with every­body as much as pos­si­ble on this.