Practical Consideration

We’re thinking about a redesign of Seabury’s website based on Moveable Type, and the question arises of whether to allow our design to encompass any pages not generated through the MT engine. The rationale for static pages (in the sense of “designed to be static,” not just “generated once at a rebuild rather than constructed on demand”) would be a greater degree of flexibility with regard to layout and content, and perhaps an easier transition from pages built under our present design schema; the downside would be that the MT search function would not be able to search the “static” pages, and that we’d have two modes of preparing data, one of which constitutes a near-total wild card for the page writer.

The more I think about it, the righter Micah’s advice on the topic sounds: All MT, every page. But I still want to think it over, to make sure I’m not missing some important angle.

By the way, I was this close to changing my Disseminary blog over to WordPress, of which I’ve gotten a generally favorable impression from an experimental site — but at the last minute we got MT 3 working over the smoking rubble of the old installation, and I have to say that the new version provides a very helpful approach to handling unwelcome commercial comments. I haven’t settled all the way in yet, but I like the transition so far.

4 thoughts on “Practical Consideration

  1. You know I don’t say this all the time–

    but I think he’s right, too.

    The other way just sounds like a nightmare in the making.

  2. I use the templates feature of Movable Type to create static pages (of which I don’t have many) – they appear within the search but each static page is generated by it’s own individual template that includes common header/footer/sidebar modules. Haven’t done it too much and it’s a bit of a pain to have to use the MT interface to set each page up but it works. I tend to format the content in Dreamweaver and then drop it into the template. Got the idea from: http://a.wholelottanothing.org/features/2003/07/beyond_the_blog

    Another alternative it to create several MT blogs each with its own distinctive style and templates for the different content and then link them toget her with plug-ins or PHP code. Allows different users for different sections but still unified within the search. Under MT 3 that would raise licencing issues/costs to deal with.

  3. Well, I don’t know about all the ins and outs of that, but I do know that the Seabury site still has old photos of Jim Lemler, Susan, Shroff/Barfield and Sonja Reid. Might an update be in the works?

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