Movable Type Blogging Software goes open source

Posted by ljmacphee on January 24, 2008 under blogging, things you should know, useful software | Be the First to Comment

Movable Type Blogging Software Blog ( Downloads and other specifics at this site. )

Movable Type Blogging software has been around as long as blogging. It is used by many of the bigger name blogs you know and love.

Movable Type can import your Wordpress or Blogger blog.

Those who have been using Movable Type love it. I haven’t tried it. I have noticed many reports of bloggers leaving Movable Type for Wordpress. While Wordpress needs only PHP and MySQL which you will find installed on just about every webserver, Movable Type also needs some Perl which may or may not already be installed on your webserver. Most Apache webservers will have everything you need for Movable Type and Wordpress.

If you are ready to move from Blogger, consider both Wordpress and Movable Type.

See:
Movable Type vs Wordpress
Movable Type 4.0 from a Worpdress user’s perspective

Coppermine Photo Gallery

Posted by ljmacphee on December 10, 2007 under coppermine, useful software | Be the First to Comment

I decided it was silly to be sending my users to Flickr to view my photos instead of hosting them on my own server. So I played with various photo gallery tools over the weekend. I decided on Coppermine because it was the only gallery I tried that set itself up with out a battle and everything worked from the start.

You’ll need php and mysql on your server.

Right now I have it up on TimesToCome my personal site, my Garden and House plant sites.

Coppermine comes with several themes, I found them easy to customize. There is only one css and one html page to deal with. You can also easily customize the number of images shown and a billion other details in the administration panel. You can allow people to join, upload photos, send ecards of your photos or not. Everything is customizable. So much so that you could get lost and spend weeks tweaking the software.Coppermine is both free and open source.

Coppermine’s biggest flaw is that it sorts and stores photos by position, not name or id, so it is not search engine friendly nor is it easy for you to link to specific photos.

PHP code to display a Coppermine photo badge in a webpage

WP Plugin to display a recent photo badge from your Coppermine gallery