Can anyone help on this? I have been using Six Apart's Typepad
http://www.typepad.com for blogging for the past two years and have been
very pleased with it, so I wrote a grant application to buy a copy of
Movable Type http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ 'the premiere choice for
weblog power users', to install on our brand new Faculty webserver
(purchased according to MT's spec). We were excited to get the grant and
installed the new server and software in early January, since when we have
been experiencing endless difficulties and now, almost 2 months later, we
are no nearer to getting it up and running. The whole thing is hugely
frustrating.
The development team includes myself, not a programmer but a very
experienced Typepad user, plus our Systems Manager, who specialises in php
and perl, and a web developer colleague with whom I have worked for several
years on Cold Fusion based applications. No novices, I hear you say. So why
can't we get any of it working properly? And why is it so difficult to get
appropriate MT support? Their helpdesk people are friendly and prompt, but
we seem to be going round in circles. And they will only allow one of us to
have a helpdesk password, so either I hand over my private passwords to the
team, or everything has to go through me.
My biggest grouse is that I had thought I was buying a product something
like Typepad. Instead, I've got an empty shell which has to be customised
with various bits and pieces from numerous different plugin designers, most
of which bear little relationship to the functions I liked so much in
Typepad, such as Typelist, Design, Themes, Layout etc. Furthermore it seems
to require a great deal of template design from the users themselves, and
since we bought this in order to show colleagues and students how easy it is
to blog, I'm somewhat depressed at the idea of having to train them all to
use html templates. We have no money to pay experts to disentangle the
situation, and anyway we rather resent any idea that we should have to buy
in expertise when we already have plenty of skills at our disposal. So what
shall we do?
This was certainly not in my imaginings for our wonderful new faculty
blogosphere :(
Yours, demoralised and fed up with Movable Type
Sue
Sue Thomas
Professor of New Media
School of Media and Cultural Production
Faculty of Humanities
De Montfort University
The Gateway
Leicester
LE1 9BH
United Kingdom
+44 (0)116 207 8266
[log in to unmask]
http://www.mti.dmu.ac.uk/~sthomas/
DMU Online MA in Creative Writing & New Media
http://writing.typepad.com/cwt/
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