I liked Typo. It had much goodness. It’s AJAXy attractiveness, especially when I picked it up, was a thing of beauty.
But I got fed up. Not with Typo itself, although I’ve not been best pleased with how some of the admin UI appears to have gone in the 5.x series, but with the pain of Rails. Rails is a fast-moving target, and there appears to be minimal concern with backward and forward compatability. Perhaps it’s a sexy dev environment, but from my point of view there are a bunch of (unacceptable) pain points; specifically:
- There’s an ever-moving feast of deployment options - FastCGI, mongrel, capistrano, you name it - that change constantly. Sometimes the feast turns out to be a meal of shit cakes.
- The API churn means there’s no easy path for me to migrate this version of Typo to newer ones. I can’t run this one on Rails build that will support newer versions of Typo. Newer versions of Typo won’t run on older builds of Rails. This is at the point where an evening of fooling around suggests I’d need to do a minimum of two custom Rails builds and possibly a full Ruby build just to roll forward.
I know Ruby is hip and sexy and stuff, and that things like frameworks on, say, Perl or PHP are, like, sooooo 90s, but really: I’d like to be able to roll forward my blog software without it performing a process I believe we in the technical trade refer to as “shitting blood and dying.” I’d also like it to require slightly less planning than would be required for rolling an enterprise banking app, you know?
(I’d also suggest that when it’s trivial to find Rails hackers coding up solutions to escape the pain of migrating their blog software there’s an indication that something isn’t right there…)
