Jenna's House of Idiosyncrasies Version 10.0 [Focus.]

You probably haven't noticed, but you are looking at a brand new site. After nearly six years of powering jennatollerson.com with Movable Type, I decided to follow the advice I've been giving out in my professional life for the past year, and rebuild the site using Drupal. This was not a particularly easy decision, as it meant migrating nearly 600 entries, and their comments, and their tags. Not to mention images, audio, and video files.

As you might guess, there is not a super simple way to do this. I got lots of help from this page, but it took a lot of trial and error, after which I went through and audited my content, trying to fix most things that were broken. Many links are still broken. However, it had to be done, because Drupal is a vastly superior CMS, and in the risk of having my salesman persona bleed into this site, I'll tell you why. This is going to be a developer-centric entry, where I talk about lots of geeky things. You might get bored , and for that, I apologize. If you came here looking for an entry all about my dark feelings, you'll have to wait for another day!

I. Designing for Drupal is Simple

In Drupal, you have themes, and in MT, you have templates, but in both cases, you are basically talking about the same thing -- a set of HTML and CSS that governs the way your site looks. Redesigning with MT was always kind of a pain. The template structure is vast and bystantine, and has actually gotten more complicated, not less, with MT 4 (I migrated this site from MT 3.34 but I have used and attempted to design for 4). Images aren't stored with the templates, and just when I was getting used to all the proprietary template tags, they decided to change them all.

With Drupal, you can design a theme that includes all HTML, CSS, images, and in some cases Javascript, put it all in one folder and upload it to any Drupal site. Because Drupal generates much of the HTML and CSS for you on things like new blog posts or comments, it is actually super easy to create a bespoke design without having to reinvent the wheel each time. The templates are based on PHP, and not proprietary tags, so you can easily write your own logic into them using the programming knowledge you already possess.

Finally, there is a very strong separation of style from content, including the menu items, the footer message, and the sidebar, all which had to be hand coded on my old system.

II. Adding New Functionality

In MT, you call them plugins, and in Drupal you call them modules, but the purpose of either is to add new capabilities and functionality to a core installation. Drupal modules are better maintained, better documented, and less often abandoned by their developers. They are also easier to install (usually you just have to upload and enable), easier to configure, and blend into the existing site in a more transparent way. And quite frankly, there are just a lot more Drupal modules than MT plugins, so you can do more stuff!

III. Support

When Movable Type went from being completely free to software you paid for, I gladly paid for it. Paying for a license meant I could get support directly from the MT Team. However, the last request I sent had to do with a huge bug in the archive presentation, and the solution I was given was simply that it would be fixed in a future release. There was not a bug fix release, however, just a release of MT 4, which I was never quite ready to move up to. So I had to remove the broken functionality (which had to do with some basic navigation), and just go with no similar functionality at all.

MT support usually can only be found in this paid form, or on the MT Community forums. Because MT only recently released an open source version, the help you could get did not involve someone popping open the hood and telling you what's wrong, but instead pointing you to the template tag reference.

With Drupal, you have a giant Open Source community working, fine tuning, and testing the releases of both the core and the modules. When you have a question, there are forums, issue queues for each project, handbooks, and countless blog posts by experienced devs all over the net.

What ultimately pushed me to migrate the site, however, was the fact that my old MT installation was basically falling apart. I ran it roughshod with special, off-book customizations, and due to that and some outdated plugins, a couple months ago it started throwing an error at nearly every update. I could have upgraded and patched my fancy customizations back on, but I decided to move to Drupal, which would do the same things with a few well supported modules and much less work. I thought I would miss my lovely white and green user interface on the backend, but I now realize that I actually like looking at my own design as I compose. Of course, when I get tired of this one, it will be easy to change it out for something new. Finally.