A Closer Look at Movable Type 4 beta
05 Jun 2007
After being a little mean in my quick link (and being called out for it), I decided to take a closer look at the newly released Movable Type 4 beta to see if this is a monumental shift that could rattle those WordPressians or ExpressionEnginites into switching over. Installation The first thing I noticed in downloading the beta was file size. It weighed in at a hefty 4MB compared to under 1MB fo...
Upcoming MODx Changes
14 Dec 2006
I've been keeping an eye on MODx sometime, based on some chats with Ryan Thrash. The team has been working heavily on the new backend to power everything. Jason Coward describes some of his approach on how the new framework is built. Some of the interesting things include using more of a Page Controller approach over a Front Controller approach that most of the MVC frameworks take today, and...
Spam Filtering in MovableType 3.2
06 Jan 2006
People seemed to jump off the MovableType bandwagon when the comment spam started getting out of hand. Having stuck with MovableType myself, I’ve come to discover the new spam filtering power that is currently available. Bundled with a standard install of MT are three plugins under the SpamLookup umbrella: Lookups, Link, and Keyword Filter. The settings can be configured for all blogs or...
Bookmark: CMS Do's and Dont's
09 Feb 2005
Alt tags has some Do's and Don't about implementing a CMS within an organization. The article is introductory and geared towards executive types. A good read. ...
Bookmark: Tips for a Successful Wiki
06 Feb 2005
I've never used a wiki but the concept intrigues me. Lost Boy describes Bootstapping a Corporate Wiki. Some of the concepts mentioned, such as Building a Community, are also important in ensuring any CMS project is a success. ...
Author Banning in MovableType
11 Nov 2004
I use MovableType 3.1 and it has a decent feature of IP banning. Problem is, comment spammers change IP addresses very quickly. I needed another tool in the battle against the rising tide of spam. I basically copied the Ban IP functionality, renamed any reference of IP to author and voila: MT_authorban is born! The functionality works for me but because I had to make changes to a number of the ...
Validation and Content Management Systems
14 Oct 2004
The hullaballoo over validation has surfaced again. I, personally, feel that validation is the goal to be achieved in every site. Mainly because it helps reduce errors. Errors are a vicious problem that can rear its quirky head when you least suspect. Whether you validate to HTML 3.2, HTML 4.01, or XHTML1.0, it doesn't really matter. For us technical types, maintaining a valid site is usually...
Squarespace
09 Oct 2004
I was going to post the next installment to Building a Web Application on Friday but decided to wait until next Tuesday (it's a long weekend here in Canada). So, in the meantime, check out Squarespace. It's a hosted service with a niche market. Just like I'm looking to do. His niche is blogging. It's attractively designed and has some pretty interesting features. Definitely worth a look-see. The ...