We moved over to Movable Type on TV Scoop last week. The interface is almost identical to TypePad and the whole process of posting is a lot faster, but there are just enough differences to catch you out. I've been using TP for a year, so I expect it'll be a while before I'm as familiar and comfortable with MT as I was with TP. For a start, it's not exactly wysiwyg. Like blogger, it's a strange mixture of wysiwyg and HTML. For instance, you don't have to put paragraph tags in - it will treat line breaks as paragraphs - but whenever you do bold, or emphasis, or hyperlinks, they appear as HTML.
The post categories are handled much more slickly - especially for multiple categories where a checklist is presented unlike TP which opened up the list in a separate window and required Ctrl+Click to be used to select the items.
Slightly less slick is the handling of images. These have to be uploaded as "files" and then the option taken to "show me the HTML." This creates the basic HTML to embed the picture in the post, but doesn't insert any style code, so to achieve the normal justification of the picture to the left or right of the post, and give it the correct margin, all has to be added later by hand. It's all a bit Heath Robinson compared to TP, but in the end it is a *lot* quicker.
But the biggest bonus for me is the ability to do timed posts. On TP this feature was restricted to editors, so as a lowly freelancer I could only publish posts in real time. Now (assuming I can find enough topics!) I can create my posts ahead of time and schedule them for publication any time in the future. This will be a huge benefit on those days where I'm travelling away, as I can prepare the posts the night before.
Overall the move to MT is seen as a positive thing and I think Scoop is one of the last Shiny blogs to make the move. TP was always slow and occasionally excruciatingly so. Sometimes (about three times in the last year) it even stopped altogether. Not really good enough for a professional site like TV Scoop.
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we've been on it at corrie blog for about a month and i don't mind it. The photo html bit is a bit of a pain yes, remembering to add the alignment especially. I do like that it saves faster than Typepad and i love being able to schedule things for future posting. I'd like to be able to access the jpg's and photos and just re-add them to my post if i am reusing one. Doesn't seem to be an easy way of doing it other than re-uploading it and possibly just overwriting the one that's already over there.
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