Yesterday, I upgraded my Movable Type blog with the new version 3.2 released by Six Apart last week.
The upgrade itself was straightforward, quick and relatively easy, thanks to the clear installation guide in the new 3.2 manual.
So no complaints at all from the installation/upgrade point of view. Following that guide - plus an excellent mini-tutorial by Elise Bauer on upgrading - means that anyone should be able to achieve a smooth installation or upgrade no matter their skill/knowledge level with Movable Type. So if you’re a complete MT newbie like me, you should be ok.
Where I have some disappointment, though, is after the install (or upgrade, in my case).
I do realize that, if you want simplicity in your blog platform, without having to be concerned at all with installing or doing anything like that, then you’d go with a hosted blog service like TypePad (for instance) as such things are taken care of for you. If you want to get under the hood, so to speak, then MT (for instance) might be your choice.
Yet I would still expect some things to be a lot easier to understand than they currently are if attracting newbies to the platform is one of Six Apart’s goals.
With version 3.2, there certainly is a lot of great new functionality that would clearly attract anyone looking for a better balance of total control of their blog structure with an easier way to tweak things than with previous versions. Before, you’d need to be pretty clued in to understanding MT’s tags especially, or be at least willing to acquire some essential knowledge of them and how they work.
Not for the casual user or the faint-hearted, really.
Version 3.2 does give you quite a bit of the TypePad-style hand-holding re blog set up and changing the look-and-feel. The new StyleCatcher feature, for instance, is an excellent concept and will go a long way to tempting newbies looking for easier options in control for their blogging needs to move or migrate to MT.
Yet it seems to me that such great features are not well implemented. My experience with StyleCatcher has been very disappointing - it doesn’t seem to work both in using it and retrieving new styles from Six Apart’s online library (nothing downloaded would actually be saved on my server).
Yes I know 3.2 has only just come out. But it’s no longer a beta! I’d certainly expect it to be a lot easier to dive in after installation and do what you want to do with the new features and functionality. And I’d certainly expect the help system to be a bit more complete - every question-mark link I clicked on from within my MT installation got to the online MT help system with pages saying “Coming soon…” That’s just not good enough.
So I’m spending far too much time scratching my head and trying to figure out why something doesn’t work. It looks like quite a few others are doing their own head-scratching as well.
I contrast this experience with WordPress - total simplicity by comparison.
But I will persevere. I want to use Movable Type. It’s far too much hard work from the outset, though, with just getting up and running.
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New Movable Type disappoints
I’ve spent a bit of time this weekend upgrading my Movable Type experimental blog to the latest MT version 3.2 released on 25 August. Installation of the new version was pretty smooth, no real issues with it, thanks to the
To be clear, we’ve made StyleCatcher a plugin because it doesn’t have the level of polish, testing, and (forthcoming) documentation that we expect of the Movable Type experience. So I’d honestly understand if you were disappointed with your StyleCatcher experience, but I’m surprised if you’re not much happier with the experience of working in Movable Type on a day to day basis with the improvements in version 3.2.
If you’d like more of an overview of those points, I’d love to find time to talk about them.
Thanks, Anil. Interesting what you say about StyleCatcher. That certainly is not my impression from reading the description of what it’s supposed to do. No indication on the website that it doesn’t have the polish, etc. On the contrary, the site extols the plugin’s coolness as a great way to easily change the look-and-feel of your blog. For example:
“And while we’re very proud of the work that goes in to making an attractive style, we realize it can still take work to apply a design to your blog. So we’ve reduced the work of switching styles by making StyleCatcher, a new plugin that lets you change designs with just a few clicks, any time you want.”
Well, it doesn’t work in my MT 3.2 installation, sorry. It’s a pity because I would just love to do what the page says - switch styles with just a couple of clicks (which is similar to what I can do now with WordPress). I did have quite a job installing it in the sense of not knowing where on my server the various files in the zip go - no documentation in the zip you download to give you any indication on what you’re supposed to do to enable the plugin in your MT installation. Maybe you sort of automagically know this if you’re a long-time MT user.
I’m a newbie, I’m afraid, and I do need a little bit of help. And therein is the root of my disappointment with 3.2 post installation. Installation itself was pretty easy thanks to the excellent installation guide in the new 3.2 manual. But for me, that was about as good as it got.
I would just love to get cracking with 3.2. But if you read the posts I’ve written over the weekend in my MT experimental blog, you’ll see a lot of frustration in not being able to find *any* helpful documentation on doing simple stuff in 3.2. Like, for instance, being unable to find out what the tags are for adding stuff to your sidebar. I posted my frustration about that one (and filed a help ticket asking - no reply so far).
I really don’t understand why you shipped the release version where the content in every single help page you get to from within the installation just says ‘Coming soon…’ Inevitably you will get a lot of keen but frustrated users, even long-time ones judging by blog and forum posts I’ve seen over the weekend.
I’ve read about all the improvements and new things in 3.2. And I will unequivocally say - it looks a terrific product, one that you and everyone at Six Apart should take great pride in. And I congratulate you for developing such an advancement in the MT publishing platform (or do I call it now a content management system?). Yet I’m not able to make use of much of any of this yet. I really do want to but not with these hurdle jumps.
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