Hi all,
I've got a few questions about MT, and I'd love it if somebody could give me a little guidance. Specifically, I'm looking for a content management system for a news site, and would like to know if MT is a good choice.
What I don't want is for the site to look like a blog - I'd rather it be more portal-esque. That is, I don't want users to be able to log-in, or post comments, or any of that. Myself and one other editor would be the only ones posting. It will be a news site, not a collaborative site like a blog. Is MT a good choice for this?
Also, how much tech knowledge will we need in order to pull this off, if it is indeed doable? I've spent some time visiting MT community sites, and it's pretty clear that many MT users are PHP experts. As a non-PHP programmer, am I wading into water that is too deep for me if I choose MT?
Thanks in advance for any guidance anyone feels like giving,
James

Movable Type is very configurable.  Its definitely possible to have a non-blog look and feel to it.

Knowing a little bit of php is helpful, but not necessary.  It depends on how much "accessorizing" you want to do to the templates.  There are a great deal of things that can be done without PHP.

You might check out a few sites that are posered by MT - Ride For Life is a news site, dedicated to news about ALS.  It does have comments enabled, but it might be an example that would give you a feel for another type of news blog.  Boxes and Arrows is an amazing use of MT, but I'm not sure how much PHP is used in addition.  

Feel free to post back if you still have more questions.

Kristine

Hi Kristine,

Thanks for the help. Mind if I ask one more dumb question?

The site will be divided into categories, just like a typical news page. In this instance, would each category be a separate blog? Or does one blog get divided up into categories? (I'm really kinda confused by a lot of the ideas at work here ... and I sure appreciate your patience)

Best,

James

If you want it to be divided up into separate blogs for the different categories, you can do that, but you also can use the internal categories settings to have an index page for each category.  On the aforementioned Ride For Life site, its all one blog, and he uses category archives to list all of the entries that match that category.  And then he uses the latest post from the Top New category to post on his overall index page for the site.

If you want to keep things more separate, you can use different blogs, but its not necessary if you formats will be the same for all the posts, etc.

Is that more clear?!

Kristine

James, I just thought I would also toss in here that not everyone is a PHP expert.  I personally use small snippets of PHP code on my personal site, but those are ones that I have copied & pasted from sites like ScriptyGoddess.  Of course my site is a more typical blog format - but I can envision creating a site like yours without PHP.  Hope that helps!

Hi everybody,
I am also thinking about installing MT on my Homepage and I have a question I'd like to have answered before I install it :
How do you actually implement the script into a page ? Can you call it in a certain place with these <!--exec cgi...>  tags ? That's what I did with NewsPro and it was working quite good.
Or is the script generating a whole page ?
Thanks for your answers in advance,
Greetings from Luxembourg,
Aalen.