box of Jack

I mentioned in my first post that I wouldn’t recommend Typo for anyone looking to install a blog engine.

Rails Fever

I started playing with Typo because I thought, finally a capable blog engine with some decent development momentum behind it. I’m a natural tinkerer and I like being able to upgrade things and see its progression into something great.

Typo has a lot of features straight out of the box with no messy plugins. Things like Akismet spam filtering support, tagging, sidebar customisation, Markdown, etc.

The admin backend is also really polished and it’s pretty hard to fault.

From a nerdier perspective, Typo offers powerful theme support with well laid-out templates that are a little saner than Wordpress’. Installation is not nearly as painless as Wordpress but all the fiddly stuff I had issues with were related with FastCGI and the Dreamhost environment in general.

Typo runs on Ruby which has a hype and love factor much higher than PHP but is also harder to support and not as fast (yet).

Fresh Goes Better

As a side note, the default theme, ‘Azure’ is pretty lame. It’s sort of pale blue and corporate to the point of boredom. The other default theme, ‘Scribbish’, is quite an improvement but won’t really suit everyone’s tastes.

In other words, do not install Typo unless you intend to theme it yourself.

Complaining

There are some annoyances. Like no button to require commenters enter their email. Instead it just quietly marks them as spam. And you cannot elect to receive emails about things being marked as ‘Spam?’. Instead I have to log in periodically to check.

I’d much rather just ticking something to require emails so we don’t have to dance around like this. I think I might do a javascript check for an email address or simply just implement it in the actual Ruby code itself.

And editing comments? Forget about it. So far I’ve had to fire up PhpMySQL twice to fix typos in some comments that have been made.

The big annoyance with Typo is that the development momentum behind it has sort of slowed. Their Trac wiki is all but inaccessible for me and the user community is just a trickle. Over the coming month or so I’m going to have to figure out how strongly I feel about this and maybe get involved in the community myself or just give up and switch to Textpattern, EE or Wordpress.