I took the bait and tried out MovableType4 Beta, the “other” and “original” blog software that announced a new, open source and feature-rich version (4 beta) today. I’ve been a faithful (but not necessarily happy) WordPress user for several years now. I really thought WordPress would’ve been further along by now (more AJAX, better drag-drop features, better in-line image handling, etc). I downloaded and installed MT4 because of the releases this morning eluding to some of these rich UI features being included.

Summary:

• The system is still written in Perl (CGI) so get ready to spend an hour installing additional Perl modules. I have a fairly recent version of XAMPP’s distro on my server which is usually sufficient for hosting LAMPP web apps … but not MT4.
  • You’ll have to add “Options +ExecCGI” to your Apache config and open up the permissions on all these CGI files before any of this works.
• Perl Modules installed, now I install MT4. The web-based installation was quick and painless.
• The Admin UI definitely has more flash and AJAX but is counter-intuitive.
• I immediately setup a new blog and attempted to import all of this blog’s entries to see how they looked. I figured MT4 would at least be good at that seeing as how they’re biggest challenge now is to steal market share back from WordPress.
• Before importing, MT4 suggested I setup my publishing paths (I’m assuming that means how the URL’s will be generated for my posts). Makes sense. So I clicked the provided link to do so and got this message (click to see the full screen):
  
  So clearly the software still has some serious bugs.
• I also attempted to configure other options for the blog but after about 15 minutes of screwing around, couldn’t find where to set them. Maybe I’m too used to WordPress, but after a few hours with MT4 I decided the software wasn’t worth the time and hassle.

I am hoping some healthy competition in the blog software space will make WordPress an even better product. I don’t think they have to worry too much about MT4 for now, though.

I’ve been using the formerly online-only task manager at www.RememberTheMilk.com. It has a slick AJAX interface and great features that allow you to add tasks quickly, prioritize them, set recurring tasks, maintain multiple lists, integrate with Google apps, and so on.

My biggest problem with them was that the service would go down periodically, leaving me unable to update my list. The recent rollout of Google Gears, Google’s framework that allows web applications to operate in the absence of an Internet connection, and RTM’s integration with it has solved all my problems.

RTM now lets me switch between online and offline mode without disrupting the usefulness of the application.

I’ve been off Microsoft Outlook for about a year now (thanks to Google’s Domain Applications which gives you mail and calendar). Now the task management problem is solved as well. Nice job, RTM!