Recently I’ve went through an experience I would rather not repeat. I made an attempt to convert NASA Watch from our commercially licensed Movable Type 3.35, which it currently uses, to Wordpress 2.5 with results that did not please me.
For some time now I’ve been somewhat displeased with the lack of features I could easily add to Movable Type to enhance it. In so doing I forgot one important lesson, if it isn’t broken why mess with it. It was one thing to want additional features, it’s another to move over to another platform altogether. I wanted to move to Wordpress 2.5 because it offered a lot more features in an open source environment and because I thought it would save me time. Like so many other people I have a lot of projects on the go and my time has to be spread around each project.
After the conversion to Wordpress 2.5 failed I then tried to move NASA Watch to the new open source version of Movable Type 4.1 with results just as bad. And so here starts my tale of publishing woes.
Installing Wordpress 2.5 and Movable Type 4.1
I won’t go into all the details of installing both platforms, you can get the Movable Type install information here and Wordpress here. I think that both are relatively easy to install if you have some experience working with servers. My company has it’s own small server farm co-located with a large Internet service provide so it’s easy for me to install software.
The Big Difference Between Wordpress 2.5 and Movable Type 4.1
I think the biggest difference between Movable Type and Wordpress is how the sites are published. Movable Type out of the box publishes static pages. And if you’re running a site with thousands of viewers a day, like we are, you’re very happy that it does.
This as it turns out was one of the problems I had when I converted NASA Watch to Wordpress. Wordpress publishes pages dynamically. I thought this would not be a problem as I had installed the Wordpress plugin WP-Cache which caches the pages. I was even going to install SuperCache after the problems started but was already having too many problems so decided against it. With over 8,000 unique visitors a day and a new version of Wordpress, 2.5, and with some additional features such as image resizing on the fly, it was just too much. We experienced a memory leak that brought the site down.
At this point I turned the old site back on, running Movable Type 3.35, and then decided to install Movable Type 4.1. As it turns out Movable Type 4.1 which has been rebuilt from the ground up when compared to 3.35 has its own problem.
I had no problems getting the site installed and importing the database from version 3.35. All seemed well until I tried to publish the site. With 5000 entries I assumed it would take some time. But 24 hours later and it was still publishing the static links. 24 hours!!! What took me maybe 30 minute with version 3.35 was taking me over a day. This is bad. Then I decided to try publish a new story, and would you believe what used to take maybe 30 seconds, was now taking between 3 and 5 minutes!!! No way in heck could we have something like that running in a production environment.
I then dutifully scanned the Movable Type forum boards and came across quite a few other people having the same problem, and although Six Apart, publishers of Movable Type are aware of some performance issues, it seems that an update that is not in beta is not ready yet. Version 4.15 in beta, supposedly addresses some of the performance issues but I’ve yet to test it and would not switch over to a beta version anyway for our production environment. So at this time NASA Watch is running on 3.35 with some minor updates to its style sheet and now allows comments. Until Movable Type comes out with an upgrade that deals with the performance issue we won’t be upgrading.
The Movable Type issue made me think about another issue. With Movable Type 3.35 I have three ways to publish static stories. Either publish a story right away, set a timestamped schedule for each story or republish all the stories. But what if you’re adding several stories and want to publish them right at the end of your session. Why not enter all the stories in a session then publish the current session as a whole afterward? Which brings me to Intercat.
What is Intercat and How Come I’ve Never Heard of it?
Intercat 4.0, the current version, is a web publishing platform used by SpaceRef to publish 16 of the 23 sites in the SpaceRef network including the most trafficked site in the network, SpaceRef itself.
Intercat was originally created about 8 years ago by one of companies to publish a static internet directory for the now defunct Maple Square Canadian search engine I created. Since then it has been completely rewritten by me in PHP and uses MySQL and only bears the name of the original program.
Over the years I’ve updated the code as needed but the platform interface is not the nicest to look at. And I really didn’t want to upgrade it since I felt that either Movable Type or Wordpress could meet our needs. But my recent experience is making me think twice about dropping development on Intercat. What Intercat does well is allow the editor to add stories to the database then publish them as whole to whatever site they are destined for in the network or just let the scheduled cron update the sites. It’s simple and works and has no performance issues. It combines creating a static home page with dynamic access to the story.
The SpaceRef network needs an overhaul this year in both it’s look and publishing platform. I’m now thinking that maybe I should stick with Intercat and upgrade to version 5.0 which would include a new user interface and publishing all stories statically to improve performance as traffic grows. While Wordpress, Movable Type and even Drupal which we use for On Orbit are all good platforms I think for our needs we’ll stick to in house development.
Will Intercat ever be available to the public as a publishing platform? I doubt it, as I don’t have time to build a proper install that meets everyones need, but I won’t rule out the idea 100% yet.
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August 27th, 2008 at 10:39 am
Wordpress will always be the best in my mind… I couldn’t get half as much work done without it!