Have you tried Textpattern? It’s also PHP, and as far as I know, they don’t have (yet) the spam problem MT does. I’m planning to use TXP for my future blog.

Oops. The link is: http://www.textpattern.com

Yeah i’ve tried Textpattern in the past (before I was overhauled this site again). Textpattern is still very much geared around blogging though. It does have custom fields and the like but Expression Engine seems much more accessible out of the box.

Thanks for the heads up though

Hi Mark, May want to look at the CSS in your ordered list me ol muckeroony or did you mean the text to be larger than the main copy? Me doubts it. Have you ever had a look at Wordpress btw? http://wordpress.org

Er, yeah on both counts. I know it screws up, although, need to get that sorted - ta.

Wordpress is still very much geared towrads blog publishing. I’m not too impressed with the control panel interface either. There more and more I dabble with Expression Engine, the more i’m thinking of taking advantage of the cheap dollar and buying it. It only works out at fifty one quid. The way i’m looking at it is it’s an investment in, not only my site, but my existing and future clients.

I’ve been thinking of moving away from MT as it just doesn’t do what I want for the portfolio and other parts of this site - it’s a real hack to get the portfolio working with loads of custom php variables in the keywords field in MT. With EE i’ll be able to have specific fields for all the Meta Data associated with the portfolio (i’ll also be able to add a lot more useful Meta Data to the Journal.)

Along with this backend change, there will probably be a small change to the design.

I’ve heard good things about pmachine/expression engine, however, in viewing some of their user sites, I happened across this one with the same problem (http://www.blownfuse.us). Close your eyes for the 4-letter words…

Plog (http://plog.bliang.com) and drupal (http://www.drupal.org) are also PHP-based and apparently versatile. MacZealots did a feature on drupal not long ago (http://maczealots.com/tutorials/drupal).

Keep us posted on your emigration from MT.

I’ve been trying to see what types of things people have been doing as far as customizing WordPress goes. The little I know about PHP came from playing around with WordPress. It’d be nice if I could get some of the enhancements for it to come straight “out of the box” but hey, it’s free, and there is no box.

I’ve learned some pretty nifty things to do with it. I just want to go a step further and use it to publish my portfolio in the next couple of weeks. We’ll see how that goes, and maybe it might inspire you if you’re thinking about changing the software for your personal site.

I can’t really recommend anything for your clients. What you’ve chosen sounds like a nice investment, being that not all applications are taylored for the novice user.

Wordpress is quite extensible - there’s a very large user base and a good community of developers. It’s php, which is good, and plugins take that form. But, like you say Fernando, it comes down to the portfolio - and with a piece of software designed to writea diary a portfolio is always goign to be tricky.

I’ve pushed MT too far with my portfolio here. It requires me to remember which fields i’ve used for what in MT and to also put a bunch of meta data fields, as php variables, in the keywords field. In short it’s a bit of a pain to update and also it makes editing the templates difficult because I have too close a relationship between the data and the php. Expression Engine will hopefully solve this.

I’ll certainly get you posted though. I can’t believe i’m considering this only four months after relaunching!

Good decision, Mark - don’t hesitate to email if you have any little EE issues you need help with.

Thanks for the advice and offer of help Colly. I’m having problems with posting comments at the moment though, this may be to do with the comments system in EE, but if i’m behind a fireway (as I am in work) I can’t seem to post comments without first previewing. This stops me posting to your site for example, with the live preview.

It’s more to do with the firewall I think - but weird eh?

Hmm, odd. We’ve used EE for a fair few corporate sites, where the staff are often firewalled in, but have not had any problems. I guess you’ve looked in the support forums? If not, take a look or post a comment. The speed of support and wealth of previously answered topics is usually enough. I’ll also ask a couple of firewalled folks to test poting to my site.

Yeah it’s very stange. I only had the problems in the mornings - things were then fine. I don’t know if the IT guys were screwing around with the firewall.

I’ll post a thing on the support forums to see if anyone else has had a problem. Ta.