I'm going to call this a day, but I won't like to go and get a good nap before sharing with you a few notes based on a project I've worked on today
Lynne Kiesling from http://www.knowledgeproblem.com/ contacted me saying that she needs help with her Movable Type weblog.
Basically, nevertheless she was used to Movable Type and upgraded it herself over the years, she recently encountered problems after upgrading to Movable Type v4.01 that were "beyond my coding capabilities" as she kindly mentioned.
She wanted me to recode her project templates based on the MT4 framework, to install a new Web site theme from the ones available online and to also add some other features
I've already coded a couple of projects since Movable Type v4.x entered the scene, but I should say that it was indeed a pleasure to recode her project.
Recoding a movable type Web site based on the v3.x framework into the new framework, with all the new principles introduced by v4.x apart from the excitement it brings could have also a weak point and that is called heavy "publishing times"
Six Apart tried to make this product as simple and intuitive as possible for any blog owner to be able to edit the template, go though all the included modules, create or manage widgets from the side column(s) and more.
Taking as an example only the "Widget Sets" facility which, nevertheless allows you to easily update your Movable Type Web site side bar(s) by dragging and dropping widgets, regenerating all those widgets could be a problem if we are talking about large blogs
My today's client was contained 2271 posts! Imagine Movable Type trying to always generate the side bar for each individual article page, then for the categories, monthly archives and indexes!... The whole rebuilding process took above 4 hours on the v4.x templating architecture, while based on the v3.x architecture it took only 12 minutes
I couldn't let this customer wait so much for a simple rebuild, so I've worked a bit on optimizing the publishing time which is a consultancy service we're long offering at PRO IT Service
Without sacrificing any of the very nice features included on the MT 4 templating architecture I've been able to reduce the publishing time from 4 hours and 18 minutes to almost 16 minutes which is indeed a performance
As a professional solutions provider my goal is to try to make the publishing time even better than how it was when the site templates were based on the v3.x architecture, so within 12 minutes. Because it already got quite late, I will focus on this item first thing in the morning. Stay tuned :)
Posted by Mihai Bocsaru on February 22, 2008
Permalink | Comments (0)