I really love the approach to publishing employed by MT. In particular, I am attracted to the way the tag layer makes data feel "tangible" to the designer without upending any backend code. That ability to design a template-driven site totally independent of change to programming or middleware has gotten me thinking; this obviously has applications far beyond weblogging.

Since I am certainly not the first person to realize this, I wonder what you would call this object-oriented approach to publishing. Clearly there's elements of a CMS in place, but how would you describe this unique framework to a programmer who doesn't know from blogs (and is used to editing everything, down to TD colors, in ColdFusion's Application.cfm)?

I'm tempted to compare it with the "Data Bindings" functionality of DreamWeaver, but even that doesn't capture the lightweight "roll your own" nature that makes MT feel simultaneously powerful and transparent.

Wondering if anyone can take me to school, or, even better, suggest good links about "Best Practices"  for creating a similar CMS-style framework (using web-based, template-driven tag structures) in a more corporate environment.

Thanks in advance (and apologies if this is too wildly off topic)