Over the next couple of days, I am going attempt to document the process of redesigning this blog. I’ll start with Part I, where I will talk about my decision to migrate to Textpattern from MoveableType.

About a month ago, MoveableType released a new version of their popular blogging software. Version 3 was announced with very little new features. The most notable new feature was fixes around Comment Spam that had plagued earlier versions of thier products. The biggest change with the software, was the licensing scheme. While MoveableType was still being offered as a free product, the personal edition came with some serious limitations. Now, for a simple personal blog, these limitations were not serious. But for those who wanted more than just a personal publishing system, there was a very complex licensing scheme to deal with.

Now I understand that the people who make MoveableType are trying to make a living, and certainly when they first released MT, they probably never realized how their product was going to be used. They began to see large corporations and smaller businesses using MT as a serious content management systems. So it is only fair, that those corporations and businesses pay for the commercial use of MT. Don’t get me wrong here, but I fully support their attempts to make a living, and I don’t have a problem paying for software – in fact, I donated to the MT people when I first started this blog.

So where do I fit in? Well, Digital Media Minute is a fairly simple blog. There is only one contributor/editor and I was only running one blog from my MT installation, so the Personal Edition of MT would have suited me just fine. But I teach in a new media program at a University in Canada, and this year, we decided to make a serious commitment to incorporating blogs into our curriculum. We had planned on using blogs for…

• Course Syllabi
• Student Learning Journals
• Collaborative Learning Environments
• and, an Article Publishing System

In all, we will be using close to 40 individual blogs with over 60 contributors/editors. Under the MT licensing scheme, the cost may have been too high for our existing budget. MT does have a link from their site to request educational pricing, but to be honest, we never requested information on their pricing model. Instead we decided to take a look at an Open-Source solution.

There were two products that we considered – Wordpress and Textpattern. Both systems are PHP based, which was a huge factor us, as our faculty all have experience with PHP and is a technology that we teach in our program. As we are planning on using blogs extensively in our program and within a variety of contexts, it was important to us that we chose a system that was easily customizable. PHP is an easy language for us to work with.

After looking at both systems we decided to use Textpattern, mainly because, in our opinion, it seemed like the most flexible of the two systems. I’m not suggesting that Wordpress is not flexible, but WP felt like more of a traditional blogging tool, where Textpattern felt like a very flexible content management system.

Textpattern was also being used and highly recommended by bloggers like Jon Hicks and Eris Free.

One of the nicer features of Textpattern, is that like MT, it is tag based. The tag paradigm fits nice with the needs of our program as we also teach JSP/JSTL. From a strategic point of view, when our students learn to customize their Textpattern blog, they will be familiarizing themselves with the basic concepts of using tags to create dynamic websites – much like JSTL. From a pedagogical point of view, this is very good for us.

A draw back with Textpattern, is that it is very new and in fact is still considered to be Gamma software (Gamma is better than Beta, but not quite ready for Primetime). The product is however very stable, and there are no changes planned to the core of the product before the official release of version 1.0. Another serious issue with Textpattern is the lack of documentation. On the plus side, the user interface is nicely organized and easy to use, and there is a fantastic and active support forum to help you out when you stumble.

In Part II of this series, I will introduce you to the Textpattern publishing system.

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