Hi,
I'm a long time MT user, but I find the site development process to be cumbersome, and I wondered if anyone had a better suggestion.
I have two MT-powered sites, and I'd like a good way to develop changes to my pages and design, debug them on my laptop environment, and push them live. Here's what I do now:
- I make the change to the MT template, using TextMate or Dreamweaver.
- I reload the template's page in MT to get the change, then I re-publish the site locally.
- I check the change to make sure it looks OK.
- Repeat 2-3 dozens of times over the course of changing the site.
- FTP the templates to my live site.
- Republish the live site to apply the changes from the new templates.
Steps 2-3 take a long time. I'd much rather just change the template, refresh the page in the browser, and have MT get the change, without me having to reload the page in the MT browser client.
Then there's the trouble of replicating everything from the local site on the live site--linking the right template in MT to the right file on the filesystem, having the output files match, having the widgets all work right, etc etc.
What do y'all do to streamline your development process?
Many thanks!
Reported on Movable Type 4.2
First, with 4.2, you can use the Template Preview button to get a look.
However, for design related changes, I often visit the existing published page and save a copy of that locally. I work on that--editing the rendered HTML/CSS/JS/whatever--to get what I want. Then I transplant those changes into the MT template, and republish.
Of course, that approach depends upon the kind of changes you want to make--however I think it's typically a good approach unless making major changes. Even adding widgets (or whatever) that you need MT to publish something for, knowing that I've got the HTML/CSS how I need it (with dummy text) makes it easier to get working once I fill in the MT template tags.
I don't really modify them much, but I do port a lot of styles over from WordPress (http://www.codemonkeyramblings.com/themes/ if you are interested). What I do is I have an export file that contains only about 3-4 entries in it that test various HTML features like blockquotes, so that when I rebuild the site it doesn't take long at all. If you want, I can post the export file that I use for template testing, or you can just import a subset of whatever blog you are working on into a development installation of Movable Type.