I've played around with a few different blogging packages, and so far I like MT well enough. It's a mature piece of software compared with most of the alternatives, and I like the fact that it is both server based and produces flat output. My only gripe is that it is, in fact, a blogging package. This means it's designed with the blogging paradigm firmly in mind, so it's hard to twist and bend it to do exactly what I want.

My main gripe is the templating language doesn't have quite enough oomph to it. It offers a set of tags useful for making blog-shaped pages, but not much else. There are no conditionals - I can automatically create a list of links to each category in the sidebar, but it can't recognize the current category and mark it up differently - leaving it unlinked and flagging it with an icon, for example. I can't tell it to leave certain categories out.

I also can't easily add different data types or fields to the typical blog entry. I want to treat books specially, so I can automatically create Amazon links with my affiliate code. Plus bookmarks. I want to have a different set of links for each category page.

It's possible to stretch and bend MT in ways it wasn't obviously intended, but writing Perl plugins looks like the best way to get the functionality I want. It shouldn't be necessary, though, the MT templating architecture ought to be a bit more flexible than it is.

In the end I settled on MT for kief.com because I don't want to bother either writing Yet Another Goddam Blogger, spend a lot of time helping an existing blogger like Roller, or build blogger functionality on top of a framework like JPublish.

I was seriously considering these things a few weeks ago, because I was planning to get into online publishing as a line of consulting work, but it now looks like I'm going to take on a lot of Unix sysadmin work, so I won't have the cycles to spare. So MT will let me run my site with a minimum of hassle, and if I do get some cycles maybe I'll tackle some of those minor annoyances.