The buzz started with the redesign of Adaptive Path by [stop]design and Jay Allen. They used the Movable Type blogger software to produce a commercial site. And not only as a CMS to publish their ‘Appearances’, ‘Essays’ and ‘News’, but also to manage the static content of the site! Jay Allen posted a description of how he set up the Adaptive Path configuration.
Other people already had the same idea or started working after reading the above story. Doug Bowman of [stop]design started managing his portfolio with MT, Matt Haughey explains how to use MT in alternative ways, like creating an About page and using the database fields in different ways. He also lists some sites using MT this way.
And finally, master MT-hacker Brad Choate explains how to use the MT-categories to place static content in directories. Managing static content with MT is definitely THE hype of this week!!!
I have been reading all this with a lot of interest. Already for a while Sebastiaan and I are thinking about a CMS for our Fimcap site, since this site is at this moment completely maintained by hand at HTML level.
We do use some Server Side Includes (SSI) to handle general content like the page headers and footers, and NewsPro for some content, but mostly we have to change the HTML code. This makes it also really difficult for others to contribute to the site, since they first have to understand HTML and the organisation of our site.
We have been looking around a while ago, and the best fit I could find at that moment was Plone, but since Plone is so completely different from what we are doing now, this would involve a really steep learning curve.
But now it looks like we can do it in MT. We can manage our static content, create templates, and store our dynamical content. The only thing I have to figure out is how we can implement the site in three languages. I guess I will just set up a demo and start playing…
