New Message: Re: Harvard Law's Manila Migration to WordPress

[webmaster at userland.com]

A new message was posted:

Address: http://manila.userland.com/discuss/msgReader$2570

By: Grant Dunham (gdunham at yukoncollege.yk.ca)

Hi Timothy:

I'm not sure what the future will be for Manila. But I sure would love to hear what the directors of Userland are planning.

I've been operating a Frontier server since 1998. Frontier - Manila was cutting edge back then. I watched (and benefited) as Dave Winer and others (Brent Simmons) came up with these wild ideas like edit this page; RSS; podcasts etc. and then implemented them. (I installed and implemented a web server on a Windows '95 box in the corner of my office in an afternoon. Subsites with robust memberships could be created in 30 seconds. That at a time when you need an engineering degree to create a web page and ftp it to a server - if you could get permissions.)

I would complain around our office about how Manila sort of implemented things. It never seemed to tidy up those lose ends. The documentation was an after thought. (But it was good when it was done.) I could hardly keep up to what was being developed. Every month seemed to bring new features.

But for whatever reasons, Frontier - Manila just did not catch on with the public. There were the public relations problems - shutting down public servers and services. Dave and Brent moved along to new ventures. Userland got new owners. And I think the geek world just couldn't understand a web server other than Apache using a database model other than MySQL and a programming language other than PHP. If a service did not run on Linux, it was not going to make it in the geek world.

Since then, I've seen great strides in tidying up those lose ends. The documentation has been improved. And there have been some major improvements with the adoptions of some of the concepts we used to implement with David Baylys' and meta data plugins.

But the new, state of the art features are just not coming as often. I've asked about Open ID for Manila. It will come - but not right away. Thanks to Lawrence, I expect we will be publishing Google Docs to our sites very shortly. I've been using Flickr to post photos for some time. And the response to the spam attacks was great. I only suffered for a day or two - less than a week for all my sites - and it has been fixed. But where's the Ajax UI? Where's the ability to mash the content? Where's the drop dead, easy way to publish our videos? (Edit this page for video?) So much more could be done.

I've been a little disappointed in Manila. So I looked at WordPress. I know it's popular. I know folks like it. But try it for a week. You'll be back to Manila in a flash. Try changing your template in WordPress. Not much fun unless you enjoy Linux file systems. Try adding a story. You have to log in as an administrator; create the story on the admin side; see what it will look like; then post it. I like Edit this Page.

I've tried Blogger, Druppal, WordPress, Moveable Type and a couple more. They each have their own strengths and do somethings much better than Manila. But overall, I keep coming back to Manila. Maybe it's because I know Manila. Maybe it's because I'm getting old and grumpy and don't want to change. But I think it's because Manila has done a lot of things right.

It's my opinion that Manila is a great product. But I've watched as one contributor to this discussion forum after another have announced they're moving on to another piece of software. Sometimes they were treated badly by others. Sometimes they got tired of some of the quirks of Manila. Sometimes they wanted a specialized feature that was not available in Manila.

My major concern is that more will follow. And slowly, Manila will wilt away to a few server islands like mine and a couple of others. Then I happen across another of those islands and I think - Manila's here to stay. It just won't have all the hoopla of those other systems.

I didn't answer your question. And I sure would love to read from the managers at Userland. But your question prompted something in me to tonight. Thanks

Grant

This is a Manila site... http://manila.userland.com/.