Hi. I haven’t blogged in a few years. Good to see you all again.
I’ve just installed the brand-spanking-new Movable Type 5, to run seangleeson.com and feebeeglee.com. I shall be spending quite a bit of time creating style sheets and templates for our new family of blogs in the upcoming weeks, and blogging about any issues or insights which occur. Then, I will work on migrating the slumbering swell3d.com to this MT5 installation, and possibly even merging in our old WordPress blogs (at blog.gleeson.us, sean.gleeson.us, phoebe.gleeson.us, and homeschool.gleeson.us). I also want to start a Web development blog at mr.gleeson.us. So this is the first step of a long journey.
But here is something about MT5, which has caused problems right from the beginning: why the devil don’t they want me to have blogs on multiple domains? As recently as MT4, you could put a blog at one domain (like feebeeglee.com), and another at another domain (like seangleeson.com) and and have them aggregated at a third domain (like gleeson.us), the way I am doing. But the new MT5 has dispensed with this very helpful ability.
Now, blogs cannot stand alone; they have to be a part of a “website,” which acts as an aggregator and receptacle for non-blog content. That’s okay with me, but for some screwy reason, every “blog” must be a subdomain or directory of its “website” parent’s domain! For instance, if the “website” is at www.mysite.com, MT5 insists that its blogs must be at www.mysite.com/blog1/ and www.mysite.com/blog2/ (or — even worse — at blog1.www.mysite.com and blog2.www.mysite.com), but not simply at blog1.com and blog2.com.
Why can’t a blog have its own unique domain? There is certainly no technical reason for this restriction. I know this because I just spent a day hacking MT5’s Perl code to get it to work, and it caused no technical problems, it works like a dream.
The actual code hack didn’t take a whole day, in fact it’s just one extra line of code in the Blog.pm module in the MT lib.
sub site_url {
my $blog = shift;
# This next line is the one I added:
return $blog->raw_site_url;
...
But before I did that, I spent an unfruitful day trying to write a plugin that would do the same thing. I don’t like hacking source code, because it makes updating so cumbersome. So a plugin would definitely have been the preferable solution. But when one attempt after another to modify the Blog object with a plugin failed, I finally gave up and just hacked away at the source. It felt good.
What I really hope is that the very next release of MT corrects this problem and allows cross-domain blogs. Because now I will have to hack every MT update until they fix it.
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