Fresh off a plane to the Six Apart offices here and I'm trying to catch
up on mt-dev today. Lots of questions/concerns about the dynamic
publishing stuff.

First of all, everyone: I feel your pain. I have a slew of MT/Perl
plugins myself. If I had a convenient way to make those work with
MT/PHP, I would have jumped at it.

It's important to know that the PHP rendering engine is written from
scratch; a port of MT::Template::Context and bits of the MT::Util and
MT modules. And yes, that was painful.

The dynamic publishing advantages I listed for the MT 3.1
documentation[1] are:

Dynamic pages reflect template changes immediately.
Rebuild times are substantially reduced, regardless of the number of
posts your blog contains.
Comment and trackback pings made to your weblog are also faster since
if your archives are dynamic.
All trackback pings are listed on your dynamic archive pages, as soon
as they are posted to the database.
You save a lot of disk space by not building all those physical files.
You can have any number of presentations of your site, using different
index/archive templates without incurring any disk space penalty.

These are all very tangible and desirable benefits. And with MT 3.1,
you can mix and match your publishing, so some things can be left as
static, and some can be dynamic.

You can also slip in <?php ... ?> blocks into your templates.

Naturally, this means you have a bunch of PHP code out there you can
use[2].

You can also use Smarty code too (default delimiters are '{{' and '}}',
since the standard Smarty delimiters of '{' and '}' cause too many
problems with embedded JavaScript).

This means you have a bunch of Smarty plugins that you can use[3].

And it should be pretty simple to port PHP plugins from alternative
CMSes[4] to MT/PHP.

It's all about more options, more flexibility and short-to-none build
times.

I'll be porting my plugins to PHP... any recommendations on what to
tackle first?


[1] http://www.movabletype.org/docs/mtmanual_dynamic.html
[2] http://php.resourceindex.com/
[3] http://smarty.php.net/contribs.php
[4] http://www.wordpress.org/


On Sep 1, 2004, at 2:31 PM, Ben Hammersley wrote:

>
> On 1 Sep 2004, at 15:45, app@... wrote:
>
>> MT 3.1 is out. What do we think? Discuss. ;) <tim/>
>> ---
>
> I'm deeply puzzled about the Dynamic Publishing. When I heard about it
> I thought "Great! A way to prototype page templates with enormous
> amounts of plugins and PerlScripting and stuff, without having to
> rebuild 4000++ pages. Ace!"
>
> Note this is not the look and feel - CSS takes care of that - but the
> cool plugin features that I've been wanting to try out. That would be
> great. But now it's apparent (though little realised, I fear) that you
> can't use ANY of the existing plugins. This is just weird: for an
> application that sells itself on having a huge development community,
> and the hundreds of plugins available for it, having the key feature of
> a point release basically throw that development away is just bizarre.
>
> Given that disk space is very cheap indeed, the only other reasoning
> behind the Dynamic Publishing is that it speeds up rebuilds. Surely it
> would have been time better spent, erm, speeding up the rebuild and so
> allowing the DT system to then use the Perl plugins, than rewriting the
> whole layer and wiping the slate clean with respect to third-party
> support.
>
> I mean, now MT users have been sold on Dynamic Publishing, there's even
> more reason for them to move to WordPress - because they will have both
> DP *and* a whole load of plugins.
>
> I just don't see the strategic sense of it. Anyone?
>
>
>
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>
>
>
--
http://bradchoate.com/