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Sixapart: Movable Type as a Blog Application Platform
If Six Apart's Movable Type blogging tool moves toward a blogging application platform, maintaining applications built with Movable Type will be easier. I give suggestions for architectural changes that might make building multiblog and community blog applications easier. These will be important for success in the corporate and education markets Six Apart is currently targeting.
Sections: Emerging Practice Tools and Analytics
Topics: SXSW
Sixapart's blogging products power roughly 40% of all current blogs. At the SXSW conference this past weekend, I had a chance to see and speak to Jay Allen, the product manager for Movable Type (MT), Six Apart's standalone server blogging product. Six Apart is looking to make MT into more of a blogging application platform. They are also considering how MT will integrate with advanced technologies like Ajax, a combination of browser and server technologies that creates a more seamless user experience.
Considering MT as a blogging application platform is an important development. Currently, MT allows you to create individual blogs for users. That's fine for creating a personal soap box. At larger scales, the approach quickly breaks down. For instance, administration of many users becomes very difficult and typically requires layering on hand-built software to be efficient. A similar story holds for community sites where you want to aggregate input from many blogs.
Although one-off solutions exist for these types of problems, they are brittle because the underlying blogging application is not designed with the idea that it will serve as a component in a larger solution. At a business level, moving MT in the direction of a blogging application platform suggests Six Apart sees a larger market for MT as a solution component rather than the whole solution. Of course, to execute this strategy effectively from both the business and technical perspectives, Six Apart will have to consider concretely what types of solutions MT might be a part of.
Based on my conversation with Jay, I think Six Apart has a good handle on how to make user administration better and how to start down the path of creating an application platform. I'm unsure however of the extent to which they have considered the issue of community sites. So, I have a few suggestions:
- Make creating conversations easier. Trackback at best partially supports conversations for all of the reasons I stated here. One possibility would be to build in the tagback mechanism proposed by Shelley Powers. This would work well with current services such as technorati and would allow the easier creation of local services within companies.
- Integrate multiblog functionality, currently a sometimes functioning plug-in, into the core product. Due to limitations in the plug-in, I am taking the individual blog RSS feeds, exporting them out into a third party application, reblog, and re-integrating them into MT. This type of approach is a maintenance headache.
- Overhaul the API to make it easy for people to create their own xml interfaces to MT. Of course, xmlrpc and atom are already available, and syndication formats can be generated through templates. But the ability to generate more arbitrary xml dynamically will become more important as MT begins to facilitate rich applications using technology like Ajax.
- Build a more encapsulated template interface. Currently, raw javascript still shows up in some of the main templates. The mix of business and display logic is hard to maintain.
I realize this sounds more than a little like a list of complaints. It's not. It's meant more as one community site developer's perspective on what could be better. During his talk on how to trick out your blog at SXSW, Jay mentioned the blog as a source of community and the need to focus on that. In a recent post, he noted how one of his post on DeQuervain's tendonitis had led to the creation of a microcommunity. I'd like to see MT better support multiblog communities. That support will be useful in the corporate and educational communities that are Six Apart's current focus for MT.
Bud posted this on March 16, 2005
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Bud Gibson van de CommunityEngine sprak met Jay Allen van MovableType. Hier zijn zijn impressies: http://thecommunityengine.com/home/archives/2005/03/sixapart_movabl.html... [Read More]
Tracked on March 17, 2005 07:44 AM
Comments
"Considering MT as a blogging application platform is an important development."
My work pretty much matches that description (among others), so I found myself looking closely at your suggestions.
- Shelley's great, but I don't care for tagback as a cross-blog communication system. First off, I'm a high priest in the Church of Threaded Discussion... tagback takes the already painfully flat conversation space of individual blogs and makes it global and disjointed. Second, the only upside that tagback brings to the table in exchange for the loss of rich interaction is spam centralization.
- Already done, in my case.
- Can you elaborate on this one a bit?
- That's interesting, and something I may actually play with a bit. Although there's an argument to be made that having too much business logic in a blog template suggests that you're using the wrong platform.
Posted by: Roger Benningfield at March 17, 2005 07:07 AM
Wow! Roger. Let me respond to each of your points in turn:
Talking about my proposal to integrate tagback, you remark:
"Shelley's great, but I don't care for tagback as a cross-blog communication system. First off, I'm a high priest in the Church of Threaded Discussion... tagback takes the already painfully flat conversation space of individual blogs and makes it global and disjointed. Second, the only upside that tagback brings to the table in exchange for the loss of rich interaction is spam centralization."
My experience is that people can track threading IF the posts are ordered sequentially within a topic. If people want to discuss another topic, they should do so by starting another topic of conversation. I agree that the technorati method does not always preserve the post order and makes following any of this hard. We had a good experience using river of news style aggregation as I discuss here:
http://thecommunityengine.com/home/archives/2005/03/a_learning_blog.html
Then you noted that you had adequate experience with MT-multiblog. That plug-in breaks a lot, particularly on archive pages. It would be good if this were a more centrally supported feature.
As for how I would implement my suggestion to make for flexible XML integration in the AJAX interface, I am likely to write a whole post on that in the near future. My simple answer is to look at the Java Web Service files component of Apache Axis as described here:
http://ws.apache.org/axis/java/user-guide.html#JWSJavaWebServiceFilesInstantDeployment
The key idea is that this particular platform allows developers to just write simple code that when accessed automagically spits out well formed xml in a soap wrapper. One wonders if a similar innovation could be tried for xml over http using a set of perl modules with MT.
Then you finally note regarding my proposal to better encapsulate business logic in templates:
"Build a more encapsulated template interface. Currently, raw javascript still shows up in some of the main templates. The mix of business and display logic is hard to maintain."
Well, a big reason to use a platform is that a lot of people are doing it in addition to any architectural niceties (separation of business and display logic).
Posted by: Bud Gibson at March 17, 2005 06:35 PM
"My experience is that people can track threading IF the posts are ordered sequentially within a topic."
First off, let me clarify. When I say "threading", I mean something like this:
http://living.journurl.com/?fa=rd&m=2057
(scroll down to the "thread map")
See, I already dislike the prevailing, linear model of blog comments. It makes for hard to follow conversations, devalues individual contributions, and encourages bad habits. With tagback, we have the same basic problems, only decentralized and fed through a blender of differing clocks, random usage, and so on.
The bad gets worse, in other words.
"Then you noted that you had adequate experience with MT-multiblog."
Sorry for the confusion... I've never so much as installed a copy of MT, let alone a plugin. I'm the developer of JournURL (a community blogging tool) and I'm looking at your suggestions for applicability to my own work.
JournURL communities are designed from the get-go to support dozens (or hundreds, or more) of blogs... thus my "Already done, in my case" remark.
"One wonders if a similar innovation could be tried for xml over http using a set of perl modules with MT."
It may be better to wait for that future post, but I think I see what you're getting at.
"Well, a big reason to use a platform is that a lot of people are doing it in addition to any architectural niceties (separation of business and display logic)."
I've thought about it a little more, and I actually like the idea. I can see some value in having a "code behind" template that does all the looping and conditional work, and a display template that just pours variables into markup.
My concern is that this favors beginner and expert bloggers, while confusing the intermediates.
Posted by: Roger Benningfield at March 18, 2005 11:30 AM
