Is it me, or is it Movable Type?

Can anyone help on this? I have been using Six Apart's Typepad  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   '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

Comments

[runran]

Hi Sue,

At least you're not as demoralised as this fellow:

http://www.runran.net/blog/will_code_html.jpg

>:r

[Sue Thomas]

yeah, I love that picture! if I make him a sandwich do you think he'll fix Movable Type?

[Bryan]

I switched from MT to Wordpress about a year ago. Though I have not upgraded, I was very impressed with Wordpress's ease of setup and the ability to modify template with a marginal knowledge of databases and CSS. Might want to try that if you get fed up with MT.

[ginevra]

hey there - I'm Ginevra, from Six Apart, and would love to talk to you about how to resolve this. Please contact me at the email address above and we'll set up some time to chat about what to do from here.

We'll get you sorted, don't worry!