May 27
On the up side of things, I have a 2 1/2 day weekend (I’m planning on working for a little while tomorrow). On the downside, it looks like Milenka will be working all weekend. Still, time off is time off…
I have no idea what I’m going to do all weekend. I have Team America: World [...] [...more]
Posted: under General.
On the up side of things, I have a 2 1/2 day weekend (I’m planning on working for a little while tomorrow). On the downside, it looks like Milenka will be working all weekend. Still, time off is time off…
I have no idea what I’m going to do all weekend. I have Team America: World Police (thunderbirds (pupet) looking movie made by the creators of South Park) that I can watch. If I’m lucky, I’ll get another Andromeda disc tomorrow. It due to ship today and it usually only takes one day to get here so I guess we’ll see. I have some more work I could do on the blog here….laugh… I’m getting tired of messing around with it all though really. I think I’ll just shoot to do a couple of more things before I call it quits for a while. In a couple of days I might feel differently though… Of course there’s always stuff to do around the house. I’ll spend some time doing that I’m sure. If the weather permits, I’ll try to get out geocaching one day. Unforunetly, they’re forecasting rain starting later this afternoon until Tuesday. Fortunetly, they’re forecasting it so how much can that possibly mean? 
I’m sure that on the all and all I’ll have plenty to keep me busy.
Just one more day of work to get through here…..easy.
May 27
My initial impression of WordPress is a good one. I can see it as being far better than MT. Mind you, I moved from an old version of MT (2.661) to the newest version of WP, but I am somewhat aware of the MT 3.x line as this is what Milenka is running. I’ll make [...] [...more]
Posted: under Technology.
My initial impression of WordPress is a good one. I can see it as being far better than MT. Mind you, I moved from an old version of MT (2.661) to the newest version of WP, but I am somewhat aware of the MT 3.x line as this is what Milenka is running. I’ll make a “fair” comparison when possible. I’m not exactly trying to compare and contrast the two platforms, but since MT is what I know, I can’t very well say much about WP without doing some comparison work….
Of course, the first thing you notice when you install WP is the installation. It could hardly be an easier and literally took only a few minutes. It’s been a long time since I tried to install MT, but I know it wasn’t anywhere near so easy.
As far as out of the box features go, I don’t think there’s a whole lot of difference. I’m able to future post now, which is great, but that was something that I believe was added to MT 3.x. The one problem I had was that it was more difficult to change the location of the index file (instead of it’s default, to the WP installation dir) than just putting the path into the text box on the options page. It was only slightly more difficult than that, but it took me a while to figure that out. MT never had that problem. On the other hand, the default templates seem to display correctly in WP whereas they don’t in MT (Maybe it got fixed with 3.x, but the default MT templates suffered from something called the “peekaboo bug” in IE which was an issue causing it to display things wrong with certain CSS settings. I always thought it was kind of dumb to ship something that’s broken for the browser that the vast majority (though not me of course) of people use). One cool thing is that WP can tell if you’re logged in as a user and will display other links on the page itself that allow you to easily edit posts and comments. That’s completely handy as far as I’m concerned.
As far as plugins go, I think WP takes the cake. Possibly not. There are some good MT plugins out there. I’m not sure when I last saw just a big ol’ list of them. But when I look over the WP list I see that there’s a lot of customization you can do. This, of course, is a big plus. WP also handles themes with ease whereas I don’t think MT will do so unless you put some work into it.
WP is open source and MT isn’t. WP doesn’t restrict you unless you pay for it and MT does. ‘Nuff said there.
WP is written in PHP whereas MT in written in Perl. Who cares, right? Admittedly, it kind of makes a difference if you’re trying to play around with the source code and all, but most people (myself included, mostly) aren’t. The difference between the two is in that MT creates static pages whereas everything in WP is dynamic.
Perl is a scripting language. In MT, the Perl code parses through your templates and creates static pages based on said templates. It does this whenever you “rebuild” (tell it to parse through them). In other words, it only makes changes to the site when you tell it to. The output is saved in files that people then access on the web.
PHP is a preprocessor language. PHP code sits inside of a PHP file. A PHP file is really just an html file that will get parsed by PHP before getting sent to the user who has requested the file. All of the PHP code will execute and it will generally end up outputting actual html code that then gets send to the user. It’s a really cool setup actually. This makes everything dynamic though. Every time you access a PHP file the code is run and therefore you can get different output at different times. For example, if the code access a database and displays information from the database (like a blog entry…) then what is in the database will determine what is on the web page. Basically, no “rebuilding” is needed because it essentially rebuilds every time a page is requested. In MT, users access html files created from the templates. In WP, users access the templates which fill themselves in with the correct data every time.
Obviously not needed to rebuild is a bit easier way to go. Rebuilding in MT takes time and no one likes to wait. It’s possible to actually make changes and then forget to rebuild. If you look at your templates you’ll see the changes you made, the the site (html output) won’t reflect said changes. Of course, those pages are static. Someone wants one, and the server just sends it. PHP files, on the other hand, “rebuild” every time their accessed and therefore when a page is requested code must execute before the page can be sent. This is obviously a bit slower (entire milliseconds in most cases…. ). Then again, if a page is being accessed a lot, a bit can turn into a lot. I’m left wondering if PHP has any way to cache pages (and use some reduced amount of code execution to check for changes). Anyone have any clue? It’s either slower up front (as you rebuild in MT) or slower every time the page is loaded (in WP).
That’s a technical difference though. The more relevant difference to most people is in that when you’re editing templates, you’re looking at PHP code as opposed to simple MT tags. (I’ve noticed that the standard WP PHP functions are actually called “tags”…) MT tags are pretty much like HTML tags (though they can behave a bit different). Someone familiar with HTML and it’s simplicity should have an easy time with MT tags. On the other hand, getting into an actual programing language like PHP is a bit more complex. I’m wondering if this is an issue for anyone out there. It all seems perfectly straightforward to me, but then I knew how to program before I knew HTML anyways. It seems like this could be a negative point for WP, even though the basic tags are simple to use.
As far as I’m concerned, WP actually has a decent template design (from a coding standpoint) whereas MT’s is crap (maybe they fixed it in 3.x….I’d doubtful though for some reason). I’ve mentioned this poor design before. Basically, MT has one template for your entire main page. It isn’t separated in to sections like header, footer, sidebar, boxy, etc. This is just bad design. Follow my link and read into the middle of the post if you want to know why exactly, but basically it’s just hard to maintain and prone to errors. WP does exactly what I said MT should have been doing. I’d almost say that I’m impressed (I’m certain glad!), but I think it’s the conclusion any programmer would come to. It makes me wonder about those who wrote MT for sure…
As proof of how handy modular design can be, I have my quotes. My quotes are stored in a database and then I have a little PHP file setup to randomly get one of them and then display it. I went ahead and stuck this code into it’s own file on my old site and then use one line of PHP code to display that file. It worked great. It also proved portable. That same one line put the code into the new blog. No opening up multiple files and finding the right code and then copying and pasting needed. I just wrote the one line in the one file and I was done. Simple.
To sum it all up, it’s only been a couple of days, but I’m much happier with my blog now than I was before. It’s still “under construction” if you will, but I know I’m working with a lot better foundation so that’s OK.
