I Replaced Movable Type with HTML::Mason

A few weeks ago I wrote about some of the things I love and hate about Movable Type as a content management system. I still think Movable Type is a great blogging tool, but as I tried to adapt it to my own need for a more general content management system, I kept running into road blocks. For web sites not laid out in the traditional blog format, Movable Type just didn't seem the best fit.

Being a Perl developer myself, I naturally started thinking about what I would do differently. I realized that many of the things I loved about Movable Type had to do with its potential rather than the way I wanted to use it in practice. The subset of functionality I used was pretty small. In real life, MT was too much code for me, and solved too many problems I didn't have. With the hubris of a Perl programmer, I decided I could re-implement just the parts I needed, and thereby achieve better customization for Webquills using less code.

While I'm still using MT for some other projects, Webquills.net is now running a custom code base that I have built using HTML::Mason. Switching to Mason made my redesign of the site much easier to deal with. Incremental changes could be done quickly in a standard text editor rather than through the web with MT's interface. Also, I can now easily use source control for both the code that runs my website, and the content I publish. On the other hand, MT's microformats and fine metadata are missing (I will rebuild them eventually), and there is no web interface for editing or publishing content at all. It works for me, but not for anyone else!

Over the next few weeks I'll write in the tech section about some of the details of that implementation. I'll also write about the reasoning behind some of my decisions in the strategy section. I will also be bringing up a lot shortcomings of the current implementation (and hopefully how I fix them). Of course, some the back end is just way too ugly to talk about, but I'll be trying to clean that up too.

If you're interested in seeing how a new Perl-powered web site gets built from the beginning, then follow along via the Webquills RSS Feed, or get updates via email.