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Top-level
 @jalefkowit I ran a huge multi site Movable Type system, and while WP eating its breakfast, lunch and dinner was kind of inevitable, I miss the quirky, sometimes groundbreaking nature of MT in the late 3.x days. Multi-site was baked in way before WP had it. And then there was all that glorious Perl. MT used Perl CGI on the backend to build static HTML for the frontend. Sound ahead of its time?? The scripts could bring your server to its knees, but there was a lot of static HTML in there. 7 comments
@passthejoe Honestly I think the other way MT shot itself in the foot was by limiting custom field support to just Pro users. An attempt to push people to upgrade, but it just ended up pushing people to WP, which conspicuously promoted that it included custom fields for free. Pricing commercial software is hard, etc. @jalefkowit They did have a paid, hosted offering -- was it Typepad?? They needed to lean into that and do the hosting for commercial MT users. They needed to sell the service, not the software. Hosting busy sites was a nightmare, and this was in the heat of the blogging explosion. I guess WordPress caught up pretty quickly. They lagged on multi-site, but everything else seemed to work better pretty quickly. @passthejoe Oh man, they had TOO MANY hosted offerings. There was TypePad, Vox, and then eventually LiveJournal. Too many arrows, not enough wood for any of them @jalefkowit What really stressed the servers were things like comments. A reader created a comment using CGI, and that one comment would trigger dozens of CGI rebuilds of static HTML pages. And a popular post with a hundred comments would mean thousands of HTML page rebuilds on the server. It didn't really scale unless you had a really big server, or a small number of comments. But I did love MT and hoped it would grow and not die. @jalefkowit I would love to have a static site generator today with integrated comments and robust multi-site support. @passthejoe Even on smaller sites, rebuild performance could be a real PITA. I would have advised them to focus their effort on improving that, if they'd asked me. A thing everyone I knew who left MT for WP told me was "it's so nice to not have to wait for rebuilds to complete anymore." (I suspect today you could get a lot more mileage out of basically the same architecture by pushing things like comments out to JavaScript/AJAX, so you don't need to rebuild the whole page for every single comment.) |
Gregory's Server
@passthejoe Yeah, when people started raving about the revolutionary new static site generators circa 2012 or so I was like "well this all looks familiar" 😆​