My Apologies, WordPress
Recently I made the remark that if I were to choose new blogging software, that I would probably go with Typo. I’d like to retract that statement.
Over the past week I’ve been using Typo for an internal blog at work. I’ve only had to make a few changes to the code, and while that was much less painful than digging through the WordPress source, the credit there goes to Rails, not Typo.
My problem with Typo isn’t with the code, its with the admin interface. The page to post an article in Typo is years behind WordPress’s sleek UI, and suffers from several obvious design mistakes. For example, the textarea for composing an article is hardcoded to 40 columns. That means adding a link to just about any page on the Internet causes the textbox to wrap around and then things get ugly. I changed the number of columns to 100 on my installation, but that broke something else. Typo updates a preview div with your content as you type, and this div is normally located to the right of the 40 column textarea. When I expanded the textarea the preview div began pushing down the textarea as the article grew. Very, very annoying.
Another issue I had was that by default articles are posted as soon as they are saved. No, stop that! I normally write a few drafts before publishing an article. To change this with Typo you have to click on a link that exposes a div, then uncheck a box each time you edit the article. Adding insult to injury is the fact that the link to expose the div is at the very bottom of the page and you must scroll down to find it.
And with all the awesome admin interfaces that were introduced with WordPress 2.0, I really have no real reason to switch at this point.