May I Recommend Nucleus?

Kathy Kinsley just received an interesting bit of correspondence from the Movable Type people:

I just got a letter from MT about bloghouse. It says I'm in violation of their agreement for offering to install MT for people. I thought it was only if I charged for it that it was a problem. Sigh. Anyone know how to make this legal?

Kathy actually had the cool idea of providing hosting space and a setup of the FREE MT software at a reasonable price, so web neophytes could get off blogsh*t with a minimum of fuss.

I share Richard Bennett's reaction:

Yo, Ben, Mena, Anil, and Joi: are you people on drugs? Kathy is running an ISP, and she's encouraging people to use your software by setting it up for them. You shouldn't be upset about this, you should be happy, happy, dancing in the streets happy, crying for joy happy, tears streaming down your faces happy. But you're threatening her for encouraging people to use Movable Type? Hello?

It's crazy. But then, MT's become a big damn (commercial) deal of late, so maybe it was to be expected. And there may even be (stupidly misguided) concerns that Kathy's little enterprise would cut into TypePad (more of the big damn commercial deal, and one that is probably destined to turn into an overloaded piece of crap).

But it's not like there aren't good alternatives. Nucleus is a wonderful, open-source CMS that has been put together by a talented developer and is supported/extended by a growing community of users/developers. Plus, it produces dynamically generated pages because it's powered by a PHP-mySQL backend. In other words, it's circa 2003 -- as opposed to MT's perl-driven backend that produces static pages that just cry out, Vintage 2001 Warblogger!

That's not to say MT's no good, because it is good. I've used it here for a long time, and because it's so good, I haven't been in a huge hurry to complete the ongoing redesign here and get over to Nucleus (although I was in a hurry to do it for Reductio, which has benefitted greatly). But if it turns into a pain in the arse to use, there are plenty of alternatives (b2, pMachine, and drupal come to mind as well as Nucleus) that, in some ways, are more powerful anyway.

(06-20-03 Update) Okay, upon prompting from Anil Dash, I owe a clarification on the "overloaded piece of crap" comment above. All I mean by that is that hosted blog/journal services have had a tendency to get overloaded and become bogged down, despite the best efforts of their proprietors (and I meant to link to this post, where I do express some skepticism). I specifically have in mind LiveJournal, which has had some terrible growing pains. Ben and Mena Trott are very talented and smart people, and may be able to avoid those traps. I hope so. And I certainly don't mean to be at all critical of Movable Type, which is powerful software. I've made a couple of donations to the MT coffers, so that should speak volumes. But, there are alternatives, and the marketplace is competitive. All of us bloggers benefit from that.

[Posted at 21:51 CST on 06/19/03] [Link]