Code / Appnel Solutions 

Free Movable Type Webinars Announced

Six Apart Europe is hosting several free webinars on using Movable Type starting October 9th. Business and technology themes will be covered depending on the session. Each will run 60 minutes. For more information and to register click here.

MT Catch-up

It’s been a bit quiet around here as I took some needed time off in Indonesia, Connecticut and St. Joseph’s Medical Center in Pennsylvania. (That last one will take some explaining in a personal blog post when I get a chance.)

Before I resume my regular blogging activities here I thought I’d recap some of the noteworthy MT happenings that went down over the past couple of months.

The most significant is the official release of MT 4.2 and the inclusion of the Community Solution with all paid licenses. This community-enabled version has been dubbed Movable Type Pro. MT 4.2 was primarily focused on performance improvements through code optimization, caching, and some smart interface tweaks. The TypePad AntiSpam was later added. The bundling of the Community Solution was a welcome surprise and one that takes MT into something more than just a blogging or simple CMS platform. I highly recommend all users upgrade to this version. It’s really worth it no matter what your situation.

DevLounge coverage is here including some gotchas to upgrading. We also suggest you read up on What’s New, the performance enhancements and how you can take advantage of them in your system. Also be sure to read the MT 4.2 upgrade guide before attempting to do so.

More here from the Industry Standard on the MT 4.2 release

I was involved in a discussion about the future of the MTOS code based and posted an initial plan to the MT wiki. This is something I need to find the time to return to in order to further.

A number of new and interesting plugins have been released.

Byrne Reese released two plugins that Six Apart have been using. Forum Utilities adds features such as promoting comment to an entry, highlighting comments, and closing conversations quickly and easily from the MT interface. This is particularly timely given the wider availability of community features in MT.

The other plugin, SuperPage, from MT’s esteemed product manager, was developed to aid Six Apart’s own documentation efforts and converts a single, massive MT page into a set of easy to navigate pages divided into chapter and section.

For all those wishing to produce a simple iPhone-compatible version of their site, Taichi Kaminogoya has released an iPhone Template Set for MT, that gives you the basics and a good jumping off point for something more sophisticated and customized.

Six Apart and JumpBox have announced the release of Virtual Movable Type. Six Apart writes “the virtual appliance automatically installs Movable Type and all necessary infrastructure on a single virtual machine, thus eliminating the complex task of configuring server applications.” Jesse Gardner of PlasticMind weighs in here as does WebMonkey here and InfoWorld.

Back in early August, Yahoo announced that their formerly experimental geolocation platform FireEagle was now officially opening up to all users. In the announcement it was noted that MT “will get automatic location reporting for its authors and in its Action Stream service.” Sounds interesting and I look forward to seeing what becomes of that collaboration.

Six Apart’s David Recordon announced on the mtos-dev mailing list that the OpenID 2 branch that that has been under development has been merged in the MTOS core trunk now. You can count on those features showing up in the next major release of MT.

Six Apart engineer Beau Smith ported the Sandbox semantic template set framework for MT. Beau has also been hard at work on Vanilla that “provides various template sets which only contain the code necessary to show a specific feature in Movable Type. These template sets are not intended to be used for publishing your blog, but rather to be used for learning how to add a particular feature.” Learning about MT’s default templates and features? Start with Vanilla and start working your way through the ever improving documentation.

Speaking of template sets, Six Apart’s Jim Ramsey released the elegant Mid Century template set for MT. I love it and it has lots of potential for being tweaked and customized for your own uses. (My gold standard for any template set.) Anil Dash has already done so on his personal blog.

Last, but not least Arvind is back to writing his Movable Type Monday articles for the Blog Herald — well at least for a couple of weeks he was. College students. What can you do. The last two releases are here and here. Arvind’s articles are always essential reading (when he’s not cramming for an exam or traveling) for keeping up on the great work the MT community is doing.

Lots of good stuff and more to come.

We now return to our regular blog programming.

Mea code? Mea culpa!

Just a quick note for anyone who tried to download any of my plugins. A hasty upgrade a week or so ago to appnel.com exposed a bug that made downloads impossible. Thanks to all who reported it. I made a fix the other day and things should be back to normal. Sorry for the inconvenience.

YAPC MTOS and Amazon Web Services Presentations

I’m back after three near sleepless days in Chicago attending and speaking at YAPC:NA (Yet Another Perl Conference North America). I wish I had more time to take in Chicago, but it was great to meet some many of the various Perl coders including the father of Perl, Larry Wall, who’s efforts continue to make the community thrive.

Both of my presentations where geared towards advocacy of MTOS and my latest project Bezos, an effort to create an integrated library for working with the Amazon Web Services cloud and eventually a command line tools.

PDF copies of both including the example code I showed are below.

• Movable Type Open Source (MTOS) for the Perl Developer
• Gluing Together Amazon Web Services with Perl
• Gluing Together Amazon Web Services with Perl Examples

BTW: For those in attendance or if the video that as was shot during my Amazon presentation makes it into circulation, I reset my security keys. I used the S3 Browser to show how some of the scripts had worked and that app has the annoying trait of displaying all of your account information on startup. I knew that, but did it anyway knowing I could just reset my key.

On the Decentralization, Diversification and Colonization of Perl

I’ve been meaning to write this post for some time, but my relocation, client work and now sweltering heat has kept me busy. As I begin to prepare my presentations for next week’s YAPC::NA conference I feel compelled to finally throw down the gauntlet and write because I believe they are important points that seemed to be missed by most of the Perl community.

I’ve been following Andy Lester’s Perl Buzz blog since it launch and applaud his efforts to bring “fresh blood” to the Perl community. Like Lester I believe the Perl community has a lot to offer and by no means is a dying or irrelevant language. What I believe it does suffer from is what I will call a marketing problem. Some of it is “visibility” as Lester refers to it, but more of it is packaging, perception and presentation.

This thought has stuck with me for years, but it wasn’t until I read Lester’s Perl must decentralize, diversify and colonize post that I that I felt it was time to write about it here.

If you haven’t read the post I’m referring to or follow Perl Buzz I suggest you do.

So let me state upfront again that, for the most part, I agree with most of what Lester wrote.

I said for the most part though. Where I differ is in why other languages, PHP and Ruby (with Rails), are more en vogue. To me these are important points that are getting missed and overlooked by the Perl community that has lead to this condition.

These points are most apparent by comments made in the lead up to his three objects — decentralize, diversify, and colonize.

I’m certain that PHP has become a de facto choice for basic web apps because it’s just How You Do It these days. You see enough PHP in the context of the web, it starts to sink in.

This is generally true, but this view overlooks how PHP came to such a place of prominence in the web applications ecosystem. I don’t think PHP is a better then Perl in any means, in fact I thinks it’s pretty crappy stuff that I’ve never liked working with. Still PHP succeeded because it was just good enough and made running web application easier then anything else for most people.

PHP was free unlike Application Server Pages (ASP) or ColdFusion and was easier for hosting providers to offer and maintain then alternatives such as mod_perl or the resurgent FastCGI. It’s popularity was further enhanced as a default module of Apache making it’s availability through cheap shared hosting nearly ubiquitous.

Of course Perl and CGI for that matter is equally as ubiquitous, but they were and still are perceived as a less attractive option to many because it is harder to get something up and running. FTP a text file with a mix of HTML and PHP script and a .php extension and presto! it runs. Unless severely abused, PHP is more responsive because its engine is typically persistent thereby avoiding the performance tax any language running through CGI must pay. PHP does require a server restart like FastCGI or mod_perl to pickup changes either. Further, numerous vital (and then some) libraries come built-in and are then easily accessed where others languages like Perl leave that to the user assuming they have the rights to do so. The hosting provider could, and indeed some good ones will install a lot more then just the core distribution, but knowledgeable Perl hosts seem to be few and far between these days.

As an active member of the Movable Type community I’ve seen the difficulties Perl/CGI issues have caused users and impacted interest in Perl with a broader less adept user base.

Why is Ruby on Rails so popular? Is it better than Perl on Catalyst? Or is it just that people hear about Rails more? I suspect the latter, because perception is reality. When people perceive Perl as being dead, or not as powerful as other tools, it might as well be.

I whole-heartedly agree with Lester’s observation that perception is reality. Like his observation about PHP I think it misses an important point though.

Rails, in which Ruby would still be nowhere, made it easier for more professional developers to write applications with great user experiences quickly and easily. The genius of Rails is in its marketing.

I remember when I first heard David Heinemeier Hansson present on Rails how intrigued and even excited I was with how productive a developer could be. What really made Rails work so well in this context was that it was “opinionated software” that said “flexibility is overrated.”

This is of course heresy to the Perl community, but I think that perhaps the Perl community’s treasured there-is-more-than-one-way-to-do-it ethos needs to be broadened to include that sometimes one (highly preferred) way of doing things as an acceptable option.

This is why I was disappointed when I read about Catalyst. This is not to say that I think Catalyst is bad or not capable. It’s that it missed the most important advantage of Rails and why it was so successful in attracting a large fanatical community of developers so quickly. Catalyst wasn’t what I wanted.

I think there is a large group of users that don’t care about choice, but getting their job done as quickly and easily as possible. Business managers, entrepreneurs, investors, and the technologists working for them don’t care if a web application is written in Ruby or Perl or PHP or Java. What they do care about is providing a great user experience that will attract and delight users, grow a company, and provide the best return on their investment in time and effort.

Rails made that possible by having an opinion on its conventions (over configuration), JavaScript/AJAX libraries and so on that allowed it to create tool and libraries which helped developers write less software.

This is why so many of the most popular sites and web applications to launch are written using Rails, not just because people hear about it more.

PHP and Ruby on Rails lowered the barriers to entry and have reaped the benefits. Capable and powerful as it is, Perl has not.

I’m not sure precisely what moves the Perl community has to make, but I’m certain that without more (a lot more) attention to perception and marketing of Perl interest will wane. No amount of language theory or lightning talks or state of the onion will stop that.

I do hope that the Perl community does decentralize, diversify and colonize and that a big part of that work includes making it easier for developers to use and deploy Perl applications.