Paul Harvey used to have a segment of his radio show called "Shop Talk" in which he talked about the radio and broadcasting business in which he spent most of his life. I am no Paul Harvey but I shall try the Shop Talk thing, since it seems to be on my mind so much while building this new web site.
I use Movable Type for text content, with Gallery2 for photo galleries like the Etude Cover Magazines and Old Advertisements. I've used Gallery2 for years now and will likely skip the impending update to Gallery3, this out of no distaste for the new product (I have not even seen it) but out of a reliance on some features that will be stripped away from Gallery2 in the new release. Specifically, item-level permissions, a feature which has evidently contributed mightily to the complexity of the underlying database structure but which I find very useful. I also have done pretty extensive hack work and code jujitsu with the Gallery2 templating that I would not care to re-create in a new, presumably more simplified environment. I have other reasons too boring to recount for sticking with G2 for now.
For general CMS (Content Management Systems) stuff on Scriabin.com I stick with an old favorite in Movable Type. I know that some regard Wordpress as superior, and I do not deny WP's advantages for straight-up personal writing sites. But the extended templating options in MT remain useful to me for plugging content into other CMSes and softwares. On Sorabji.com I have a section which updates automatically across 3 sites without crons and plugins, I just have a template which generates a Perl library that plugs into my DICT server, and another template which fills in a .mobi version of things. Some of this can be accomplished in WP with .htaccess and httpd configs -- I am well aware of this because I do these tricks myself in other contexts where I use WP -- but for my sensibilities of site management I prefer static files and MT's templating extensibility, as well as MT's relatively infrequent upgrades. I also like MT because my initials are MT. Hah...
An early challenge with this site, then, was to combine content from MT and Gallery2. There is no specific bridge to connect the two (and without comments and logins on the CMS side it seems unnecessary to inject whatever complexities would arise from combining the two). Specifically, when I make certain content from an issue of The Etude available it seemed to make sense to link to that content from the corresponding cover image of that issue (assuming it's available) and vice-versa. With consistent file-naming and such it was easy enough to tell MT to fill in a txt file with a list of stories from the month, name the file in a format that matches the Gallery2 file-naming system, then tell Gallery2 to look for a file that matches the base filename of the cover image. Maybe that sounds simpler to me than to others but it took just a few minutes of re-purposing an MT monthly archive template, generating a set of txt includes, then telling Gallery2 to look for these files in the individual cover pages. So while this page might look natural enough in substance I had some fun making it possible by juggling the templating languages with which I am so familiar to form a pretty stable link between Gallery2 and Movable Type:
January, 1905 Edition of The Etude (Chopin Number)
Going forward my intent is to make the site look less like a turn-key Movable Type design and more like something I would do. I am not a graphic designer by any estimate nor do I have the funds to hire one, but I think I can craft a look that expresses the character of these old magazines and their content. At present the site looks brittle, and while others are prone to complain about the relative dearth of freely available Movable Type templates compared to other free CMS platforms I find that the starter templates are perfectly adequate for letting me focus on content first, and style later.
