Movable Type 3.2 vs. Serendipity 0.9 Beta

Chris · Post by **Chris** » Fri Oct 28, 2005 6:27 pm

Hi guys,

I just spent the past few days trying to get Movable Type to work. I've been using S9Y for the past 11 months and it's an awesome engine but it's just lacking in third party support.

Anyway - you may be interested in my hands on review of the MT experience here.

The short story is that S9Y comes out smelling like roses compared to MT. But in my view, this brilliant platform is held back by very limited support for third party integrations. That's an area that more established players such as Blogger, MT and Wordpress are leading.

If we can raise the profile and branding of S9Y, I think you will knock the pants off the others.

Post by **garvinhicking** » Sun Oct 30, 2005 12:52 pm

Yeah, sadly this is an area we know that is lacking. Even though we have an active community, we somehow do not get enough respect in the "outer world". Why that is, I don't know. Serendipity's technique is not worse than WordPress, in fact I would think our code to be more flexible and well written - but we just don't get recognized as much as we should.

That's why I encourage people to tell about s9y everywhere I can

If there are specific things you think we could do to raise the attention level, I'm all ears

Of course I'm very sorry that you are leaving Serendipity. I'd do what I can to hold every s9y user, and usually we can fulfill nearly all plugin requests...

Best regards,
Garvin

Chris · Post by **Chris** » Sun Oct 30, 2005 5:26 pm

Hi Garvin,

I haven't left S9Y yet !

I'm still experimenting with WordPress. While the installation process with WP is much easier than MT, I still see many advantages S9Y has over WP.

You know what would be great - if S9Y and WP can merge and create a best-of-breed blogging solution. I will be writing up a similar comparison between WP and S9Y after I've had more time to play around with WP.

S9Y just needs more profile. If I could make some suggestions and I know you guys are all doing this on a voluntary basis and all have day jobs to take care of :

1. branding - checkout the MT and WP homepages, the have a slick look and feel that appeals to the broader web user base. The S9Y home page can be intimidating to new bloggers and they are attracted by the flashier look of the other solutions.

2. networking - the advantage that MT and WP has is that they seem to be very widely supported from an API / extensions perspective from new web services such as Flikr and the whole "Web 2.0" sphere of applications. If we can raise the profile of S9Y and get some good third party support going, I firmly believe that S9Y is a better solution than all three major platforms today - Blogger, MT and WP.

Chris

Post by **garvinhicking** » Sun Oct 30, 2005 9:37 pm

Well, WP certainly has a completely technical different take, especially in terms of templating.

WP and S9Y will never be breeded, as both want to maintain backwards compatible and not completely switch their templating methods or plugin infrastructure. As good as this sounds, and as greats the benefits for a merged community, it just doesn't fit together. :-/

1. branding - checkout the MT and WP homepages, the have a slick look and feel that appeals to the broader web user base. The S9Y home page can be intimidating to new bloggers and they are attracted by the flashier look of the other solutions.

Yeah, that's right. Sadly we have no flashy designer on board, yet.

2. networking - the advantage that MT and WP has is that they seem to be very widely supported from an API / extensions perspective from new web services such as Flikr and the whole "Web 2.0" sphere of applications. If we can raise the profile of S9Y and get some good third party support going, I firmly believe that S9Y is a better solution than all three major platforms today - Blogger, MT and WP.

That's very sad, because s9y has a much easier integrating plugin API than WP, and third party developers would have much less work to do by using our API. Ah, this is all so frustrating. But it gets better all the time, this forum is steadily increasing in usage, and more people are contributing to plugins lately. So I guess we're on the right track, and just need some more PR and reports/comparisons like yours

Regards,
Garvin

wesley · Post by **wesley** » Mon Oct 31, 2005 1:01 am

The website design can use a redesign. It's a bit 'geeky', not 'professional'.

Just a quick suggestion: consolidate the 'Blog' and 'News' menus into one.
The old news should be integrated into the blog, and the sidebar link should
have one link saying 'Blog (News)' or 'News (Blog)'. The link should go to
the current 'Blog' page. It'll lessen the confusion.

The website's information doesn't seem to reflect the current development
status of s9y completely, either. It's a bit hard to make out what it can do
now. Maybe a complete overhaul can be done by version 1.0, but now is
the good time to do this as any.

dweade · Post by **dweade** » Mon Oct 31, 2005 7:47 pm

I'm not a Serendipity user yet, just researching. The web hosting group I'm looking at uses Serendipity and I'm liking what I'm seeing so far.

On word on Wordpress: security. I work for a university and we had to move away from it due to the number of updates we were implementing. It might be that the WP base was getting large enough it was attracting lots of mayhem, but we gave it up last month.

I should clarify that the main issue wasn't having to update, but each individual install needed to be updated. When you are running 40+ weblogs, that gets to be time intensive. On an individual basis, it might not be as bad.

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Tue Nov 01, 2005 3:22 am

Hi dweade,

That's good feedback re WordPress. I'm still evaluating it for my personal needs. Serendipity is a great engine and I thoroughly recommend it. Its only shortfall is that it doesn't have a critical mass of third party plugin support that WP and MT has.

Chris

Chris · Post by **Chris** » Tue Nov 01, 2005 3:24 am

Anonymous wrote:Hi dweade,

That's good feedback re WordPress. I'm still evaluating it for my personal needs. Serendipity is a great engine and I thoroughly recommend it. Its only shortfall is that it doesn't have a critical mass of third party plugin support that WP and MT has.

Chris

That post was from me (forgot to log in).

judebert · Post by **judebert** » Tue Nov 01, 2005 3:26 am

Serendipity is heavy on the security features.

Of course, it needs a "separate" installation for each blog, so updating 40+ blogs would still be a pain. Nothing a reasonably competent Unix admin couldn't script in an hour, though.

Incidentally, we were talking about promoting Serendipity earlier in this thread. Greg Dean, the author of Real Life (the webcomic), is looking for a new blog. His needs are remarkably small (he already has something to do the comics page; he wants something to run his blog, with a bit of cross-connection). Someone with more s9y experience may want to check it out: http://www.reallifecomics.com/daily_old ... ip_id=1550

Post by **garvinhicking** » Thu Nov 03, 2005 9:18 am

Judebert: Serendipity can use a shared installation feature, where you can run 40+ blogs INDEPENDETLY, even though they are one central install.

So you only update once, and all 40+ blogs are updated automatically. Services like serendipia and supersized use shared installations (described in our docs)

Sadly the link you gave only returns "Could not connect"?!

Regards,
Garvin

winkiller · Post by **winkiller** » Thu Nov 03, 2005 6:08 pm

One problem with plugins I see is that almost nobody will write a plugin he or she saw for some other apllication if he won't use for himself unless somebody says: "we need that plugin X for s9y". Then chances are good someone will produce it. But there aren't exactly soo many requests in the plugins forums. Or I missed the majority of requests

So tell your needs here and I'm sure someone will try it if it's not too obscure .

I completely agree with the website thing.
My suggestion would be to make blog.s9y.org the frontpage and add all the useful links into a sidebar. Then we just have to get the contents from coWiki displayed in a better way, as almost none of the pages are world-writable, it won't be no loss to have no wiki, as the few people with +w could use the original wiki. That would be my idea, but perhaps it will be hard if coWiki has no feature to run inside another page like s9y does.

judebert · Post by **judebert** » Thu Nov 03, 2005 8:33 pm

Garvin: the link problem is actually something going wrong with the site. I can't navigate through their archives at all. Weird; I'll let them know.

As for the upgrading... I really should have been more precise. Serendipity can run multiple blogs in a "shared" installation, just as you say. (And who would know better than Garvin?) I was under the impression, though, that the system and core files are shared, while settings, databases, and templates were separate. So, if you wanted to upgrade the blog to a new database, upgrade all templates, or modify all settings (like modifying the document root or something), wouldn't you need to perform the operation individually for each blog? That's what I was thinking a skilled admin should be able to "script in an hour".

(I personally find Serendipity to be an astounding success. If I'm leading the conversation in too critical a direction (or just being too defensive), let me know.)

Chris · Post by **Chris** » Fri Nov 04, 2005 9:36 am

winkiller wrote:One problem with plugins I see is that almost nobody will write a plugin he or she saw for some other apllication if he won't use for himself unless somebody says: "we need that plugin X for s9y". Then chances are good someone will produce it. But there aren't exactly soo many requests in the plugins forums. Or I missed the majority of requests
So tell your needs here and I'm sure someone will try it if it's not too obscure .

Alternatively, why not just reverse engineer the existing WordPress or Movable Type plugins into Serendipity plugins ? Or just the really popular ones ?

This can create a critical mass effect that will draw more people to this platform which as a consequence will promote more plugin support in the future.

Chris

Post by **garvinhicking** » Fri Nov 04, 2005 10:54 am

Judebert: First off, your criticism is very producutive and positive. That's what we need. I wish we had a nicer webpage, but I am taking up all my time with forum support and coding already, I can't find the time to do design groundwork for the site. If volunteers can help, go for it - we're all ears.

Of course you are right about the shared install thing: The DB needs to be upgraded per-installation. But that can be as simple as a Wget Call to any blogpage, and should really be scriptable by an admin in less than an hour. Since it's always very specific to how the provider has structured his blogs, we cannot give a general instruction for that, sadly.

Chris: Reverse Engineering would work of course - are there specific plugins you are missing? I have not looked through the WP repository yet, but I was ni the impression that s9y has a counterpart for most of the plugins there. Since s9y is a bit more flexible and needs not to be hacked so much as WP, it's also much easier to integrate certain things via templating, where WP already needs a hack/plugin for...

I'm always willing to code useful plugins, but I personally only use 2-5% of the plugins available on my own blog, and I don't have a single idea for my own blog what could be missing. So I need inspiration from you guys. I'm just a poor coder

Regards,
Garvin

Chris · Post by **Chris** » Tue Nov 08, 2005 6:28 pm

Hi guys,

I've just posted my Wordpress vs Serendipity comparison here. In short, I will be sticking with Serendipity.

cheers,

Chris

Movable Type 3.2 vs. Serendipity 0.9 Beta

Movable Type 3.2 vs. Serendipity 0.9 Beta

Re: Movable Type 3.2 vs. Serendipity 0.9 Beta

We dumped Wordpress