The soft launch of Geeks in the Garden
Last year, my wife and I built a garden. We wanted to build a website to go with it, but that didn’t happen. Not this year, though. As soon as I realized that no one had bought geeksinthegarden.com yet, I knew had to jump right in.
A technological fresh start
I think what excites me most about this project isn’t the fact that the theme gives me a chance to design something more organic than what I normally design, but more the fact that I get to try out all of the latest versions of popular blog software.
This site uses Textpattern, and while it is a great platform for people who are pretty technical, but not insanely technical, I feel like it’s fallen under the shadow of some of the newer blog engines, like WordPress, Expression Engine, and even the newer versions of the stalwart Movable Type. It wouldn’t be very easy to migrate this blog to just any other platform, so starting over fresh is a very exciting idea for me.
The plan
Just this morning, I’ve soft-launched Geeks in the Garden with Movable Type Open Source 5.01, using one of the themes provided by the MT community. I chose not to implement any of my own design yet, because I want to spend some time really “kicking the tires” of the back end’s UI before I commit to MT as my platform.
Why not Wordpress?
The big thing that appeals to me about Movable Type is the fact that it can administer multiple blogs and sites from one installation. While I have looked at Wordpress MU, its multisite functionality wasn’t nearly as robust – or as integrated – as it was with Movable Type.
When I played around with MT 4, I was very impressed at the user-level preferences. For example, one user could elect to use a WYSIWYG editor, but another user could choose to compose their posts with Textile) (which would be perfect for a blog maintained by my wife and myself).
Additionally, we have talked about the possibility of sharing our blog with some of the other geeks we know who also grow vegetables. MT appears to make it much easier to create an online community of geeky gardeners.
So, we’ll see. I’m excited about it. It will definitely be an interesting growing season!