With the whole MT3.0 debate raging on, I feel compelled to voice my opinion on the matter (not that anyone will read it).
As you can see, I'm a TypePad user and a happy one at that. I do however have a server I could use to run my own publishing system. This means that one day I might want to migrate my blog to this server instead. Installing MoveableType would be the most logical choice, but as things stand I won't do that.
The reason for that is that I do not think MT is worth the money. Since I've never met or talked to the MT authors and likely never will I'm strictly neutral in the whole "they spent so much effort and should be rewarded" discussion. To me this is simply a product that is being offered at a certain price-point. A price-point that I do not agree with. This isn't about not wanting to pay for software or about demanding that every bit of software in the world should be "free". This is simply about bang for buck.
So what is my beef exactly? Well, I think that $99 (or even $299 if you consider that running AdWords might be construed as being "commercial") for what basically amounts to a static webpage "manager" written in Perl is too much.
Sure, you can argue that the actual value to a Blogger is more then $99. I might even agree with you. If however, you look at the great variety of content management systems out there (Blogging systems are just a subset of this) you'll find that there are tons of these systems which are either free or very nearly free. You'll also find that a great number of them are dynamic systems, which do not need to "rebuild" that entire site every time you make a change. The concept of "rebuilding" is so embedded in the blogging world that people hardly think about it any more. Some of the contenders, like WordPress, even use the fact that they don't need this as a benefit. It should be the other way around for Pete's sake! MT should come with a label saying: "Warning! Needs to rebuild your entire site every time you make a change!".
Database-centric dynamic content management systems have been around for years and years and are the de-facto standard. Why? Because building them isn't rocket-science! I've built them myself, in both PHP and Java. Hell me and a friend even built one using C-based CGIs back in '96. That ran a very succesful BeOS news-site called BeView on a 486 without any caching (i.e. writing out "finished" HTML pages to disk and serve them instead) at all!
And even if your system can't use a database to do dynamic publishing it still should have to "rebuild" anything if stuff changes. Simple server-side includes would take care of most of the problems. And since with CSS there is no need for any presentation information to be present in the HTML most of the rest can be (or is already) solved too.
In languages like PHP and Java using databases isn't hard, especially when you are using persistance frameworks like Hibernate it almost comes for free.
If you want to see what a (free in this case) Content Management System can do, look at Ariadne. Its PHP based, is properly dynamic, has features like visual HTML editors (yes, inside the browser), user management (so you can make certain content available only if people log in), multiple language content, a PHP-dialect you can use inside the page, plugins and more.
You could run entire professional websites like ZDNet.com or something on it if you wanted to.
And oh yeah, it is Open Source. Is the author poor and lonely because of that? No. He runs a very succesful business implementing this system for corporate customers.
But does it do RSS and commenting out of the box? No. But you could probably make it do that relatively easily if you knew some PHP. And this is just one example of the systems that are out there.
All things being equal I'd rather donate to one of these projects then to pay for a system that even after a relatively feature-poor "archicture-upgrade" still isn't dynamic.
Of course being "dynamic" isn't the be-all and end-all, and in the form of Typepad (i.e. with extra services and hosting added on top) it is workable as it is. But when it is being sold separately, as the flag-ship product of what is arguably the most well-known blogging-company in the world, it just feels old-fashioned and clunky.
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