(Alternate title: dance with who brung ya)
The announcement from SixApart explains (in a convoluted way) that the good old days of free versions for small sites are over and it’s payware from here on in.
I am continually amazed at how poorly SixApart communicates with its users, its fans. They profess to be all about enabling communication but do such a terrible job at it. I only ever hear about developments in their software by reading other sites and following the news: they never contact their users/supporters directly (yes, I donated, back in the day), whether it’s to announce new versions or bug fixes, to solicit feedback on pricing or spam prevention strategies, whatever. The announcement of 3.0 is case in point, as was TypeKey, MT 2.6661, etc.
Time will tell if TypePad and TypeKey generate enough revenue to offset the loss of MT revenue and user goodwill (companies have a spot on their balance sheet for that: a satisfied or even enthusiastic customer base is considered an asset, as anyone at Apple can tell you). Releasing a new version that removes features (unlimited users and unlimited weblogs in single instance) seems like a really bad idea. Either the folks at 6A are nuts or they ran out of features to make 3.0 compelling, so they removed some from 2.x.
<update> There’s a lot of related commentary here as well. Apparently, Drupal is another option and someone is working on a migration HOWTO right now.
I feel very disconnected from SixApart. The software’s design and implementation has been problematic for end-users and hosting companies (ask around any seasoned MT users to see how many have had to disable comments to block spam or who have had comments turned off due to unreasonable performance problems). There’s been no outreach to address these issues.
On the contrary, I feel like MT users have been forgotten in favor of TypePad and TypeKey. As those of us who started using MT (I started two+ years ago), along the way converting others from other platforms or getting them started, have watched, TypePad and TypeKey have come into being and have become the focus of 6A’s business. MT3 has been lurching toward completion with very little visibility.
Issues in the 2.x line:
* incomplete integration of mod_perl (some plugins never worked (MT-blacklist as a notable example)) suggesting that the API was not fully-baked
* spam avoidance by renaming the comment and trackback scripts also failed to work in mod_perl: this is not external to 6A but part of their codebase. The API is not a factor.
* performance issues with large numbers of posts (upwards of 2000): MySQL is of some help but there is something amiss in how the content is managed (the rebuilding and pinging processes collide with the update/comment processes, resulting in timeouts, multiple posts, etc.)
were ignored while 3.0 had no delivery date, meaning no relief for existing users.
I may temper my remarks later, but I think I’ll be looking at a migration strategy down the road.