Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with blog and type

What's the right software to maintain and display a calendar of relatively infrequent future events?

gleuschk — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 11:49:49 -0800

What's the right software to maintain and display a calendar of relatively infrequent future events, as well as blog-like news postings? I maintain a website for specialists in my field of mathematics, and one section consists of announcements for upcoming and recent conferences. Another is for news announcements: a basic blog-style list of entries. Both are currently run by our 7-year-old Movable Type installation, in combination with a good bit of chewing gum and baling twine. I'd like to redesign the whole schmear, including the back end. Is wordpress (plus more gum and twine) the right solution? Is there some other system that makes more sense? Link.

Here's the current setup, which hasn't changed since launch in 2002: Movable Type runs two blogs: "News" and "Conferences". The former is your basic blog, except that we only show one entry on the front page, and generally have only an entry a month or so.

Each entry in "Conferences" is added when we learn about it, and post-dated to the first day of the conference. This system works ok, since most conferences are just a day or two, but there are some that are a week, month, or even a semester long, and this causes problems. When first posted, they're in an "upcoming" category that displays in one place, then changed by hand to a "past" category that shows up in another place when they're past. Drawback: I often forget to change the category, which makes me look stupid. We average about 3 conferences a month, though they tend to cluster in March, June, and October. Lead time is up to a year.

I'd like to redesign and bring it up to web-2.whateverwe'reuptonow snuff, both in front and behind. Wordpress seems to be the default these days. I could do the same acrobatics to get the conferences into wordpress, I guess, but it sure seems like there should be a better way. Do you know of one?

I run this out of my pocket and in my free time, so free and drop-in solutions are best, but if you've got good ideas, lay 'em on me.

Create a blog that uses faceted browse?

xammerboy — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 16:03:02 -0800

I'd like to create a recipe blog that lets users search for recipes using faceted browsing. For instance, searching recipes by ingrediant, cooking time, etc. Is there a MoveableType-like solution I can use to easily create this site?

Website for the masses!

sirliberal — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 08:05:32 -0800

Non-Profit Website: How to allow non-techies to edit! Problem: I work for a small (150 ppl) non-profit as a netadmin and we want a webpage (zomg 2007 right?). My specific issue is I want a platform that will allow:

Adding content/deleting content/adding PDF's/adding images

Without requiring input from me. The bureaucracy of our organization means that this will make life MUCH easier for me. As a result I prototyped the site in Plone, which worked out great except Plone is a flaming turd of a product.

I really like Plone's in-template editing, drag and drop content ordering, staging (ie, bits can exist on the site ONLY when logged in). I need something that will run on Dreamhost (which is pretty much anything PHP/Perl/etc).

I have looked at: (ask://cms)

WordPress
Expression Engine (I'd love to have their main site tempate)
TextPattern (Perfect Implementation)
SilverStripe

This seems like a rather trivial adventure, except all of these products seem geared directly towards running a blog, with side static pages, as where Plone was a content manager with a blog addon.

Is CMS a synonym for Blogging these days? My users are fairly inept, and I do major styling (ie, they can handle textarea with buttons for formatting). I would love something where they can easily add sections. Let's use the Library site linked above as 'implentation' which uses features that aren't available to the public.

* Major sections, subsections shown on the right in content area
* Each major section has a 'landing page' that is styled differnetly
* User's can concievably add a new content area and it is automatically added to the navigation system.

One specific gripe with MT is that it seems to be all static pages, and I see a benefit to having dynamically built pages so I can add in php code later to do things on the fly (database lookups in page?).

I don't need any blogging functionality at all, which is the biggest stumbling block here. Everything I look at is primarily driven off this 'articles' idea, whereas I simply want 'pages'. I want to have a way to specify the display order in the navigation. All things Plone did, but I cant find something more lightweight (preferably in PHP) that can do the same.

I am on the edge of just writing my own custom app in PHP/Smarty, but it seems silly to do that when SOMETHING must automate this all for me. There are great examples of sites running off these platforms.

Blog Spam is Annoying.

miss tea — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 11:56:11 -0800

Blog spam question-- why would blog spammers only be posting on a single (months old) entry on my blog? I have a blog hosted on Movable Type. I get 3-5 spam comments per day, but the weird thing is that they are only ever posted on a single entry. Just curious if anyone knows if there's any reason for this?

In a related question, why do MT's spam filters suck so much? How hard is it to tag something with the word Cialis in it? I have it set to most aggressive, but that flags all of the real comments and lets through half of the spam ones.

How can I make blog entries appear in different ways besides stacked?

Unsomnambulist — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 18:28:26 -0800

I want to set up my next blog similar to how Sploid! looked (www.sploid.com), or so that entries don't simply appear stacked, most recent first. Are there existing templates or codes available that could do this in Moveable Type, Word Press, or any other utility?

Which PDA: just for typing up plaintext?

vanoakenfold — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 08:58:39 -0800

PDAfilter: I know essentially zero about PDAs except generally what they do and what they look like. I'm looking for one pretty much just for... ...typing up ideas when I'm at work so I don't have to write it all out by hand, and I think of quite a bit. I also have a blog and think of good ideas to write about, so I could effectively write the whole blog entry at work. Is there a cheapish PDA (color screen doesn't matter much) that I can use one of those nifty portable foldout keyboards, and upload stuff to the HD at home like a USB drive (or with an SD card)? I pretty just need a plaintext editor.

How do I do a global wordcount in MT?

Marquis — Sun, 27 Nov 2005 09:22:12 -0800

How do I get a global wordcount for every post made on my MT 2.66 blog? MT Wordcount only seems to have tags for obtaining the number of words in each entry. I want to know the big number that is the total sum for all (558) entries on the blog.

Apparently MTWordStats used to do this, but the plugin's no longer available.

Thanks!

Can I can the url for my blog without reinstalling movable type?

richtea — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 20:47:21 -0800

Can I can the url for my blog without reinstalling movable type? I currently have my blog as the index file on my domain, but I want to build a new homepage and have a link to my blog from there. Can I do this without upsetting my movable type install, and if so how do I do it?

Movable Type Installation Error

hautenegro — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 08:50:56 -0800

I managed to install movable type to my server without a hitch, but on the mt-load.cgi page I got a long error... Loading initial data into system...

An error occurred while loading data:

Unsupported driver MT::ObjectDriver::DBM: Can't locate DB_File.pm in @INC (@INC contains: ./extlib ./lib /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.0/i386-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.0 /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.0/i386-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.0 /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.0/i386-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.0 /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.0/i386-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.0 .) at lib/MT/ObjectDriver/DBM.pm line 9. BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at lib/MT/ObjectDriver/DBM.pm line 9. Compilation failed in require at (eval 4) line 1. BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at (eval 4) line 1.

Does anyone know what this means? How to fix it?