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August 31, 2004

Movable Type Templates

I'm a very new blogger, it's normally quite unusual for a computer nerd to flatter this hot baby so late :-). Now I have been onboard for two weeks, how do I think about this blog program - Movable Type 3.01D? In simple words, very powerful but very difficult to customize.

Let's focus on the templates in this post, before I started, I thought the layout could be customized easily in the control panel, for example, add link section, define logo, etc., unfortunately I only found some templates which are definitely difficult for normal computer users to manipulate. Then I reckoned there must be lots of ready-to-use templates on the Internet and started searching with Google, but found nothing really useful or meet my requirement, I have to admit that I didn't extensively look for it, just spent about 20 minutes every time when I was bored.

As a result, my blog was still using the default templates after 10 days, even didn't have a link to the homepage. I can't bear it any more and decided to look into the manual, IMO, Movable Type documentation is very poor, it's not very helpful if you have little experience before, but the good thing is MT has an active support forum, by reading the manual and some old posts, with almost one day, I eventually managed to customize the layout as exactly what I want, which looks the same on IE and Mozilla, I thought it should be 5-minute work.

I'm quite satisfied with the result, but not the procedure. Movable Type really needs a good and useful documentation, some easy to follow tutorials even for new computer users, and the most important, add functionality which make the customization straightforward, this should be very easy from technical point of view. I'm a Java programmer and a part-time C++ programmer, reading documentation is my daily task, if 20% of them are like MT, my work would be a nightmare.

So if you want to customize your blog layout, what should you do? My suggestions: search MT support forum first, you may find ready-to-use scripts and insert into your templates. If you are not lucky enough, then you have to read the poor MT manual and try again and again, till everything works fine.

Posted by dvd software at August 31, 2004 05:37 PM

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