When all you have is a hammer...

Via CamWorld, I found Matt Haughey's article on using MovableType as a low-rent CMS to manage your site, and Brad Choate's interesting response.

I found this article really interesting because I'm doing the same thing with the Minnesota for Dean site. The whole site is powered by Movable Type, and although there are some problems, overall it is working very well. Brad Choate's post was also good, because it addresses one of the problems we've had: creating static pages that no one can edit (without getting access to the templates and knowing HTML, anyway).

I thought of a fun trick to try out on the Minnesota for Dean website. I'm using category archives for all the sections, so items in the "Events" category go in the /events/ directory and are viewable there: http://www.minnesotafordean.org/events/

However, some of the sections are static because they wouldn't do well in a weblog style (like the Volunteer section). These are handled using MT templates, pretty closely to what's discussed in the articles above. However, this means I can't create a blog category called "Volunteer" because its archive file would conflict with the static template file. And I can't change the archive file format because I want the other categories to keep working the way they are now.

My idea is to change the welcome page order in Apache. I could create a welcome page called mt-static.html which would go before index.html and modify my static templates to write to that filename. Then I could have a category called "Volunteer" and a static page rooted at /volunteer/ without any problems.

Why would I want to do this? Well, I could have site authors writing stuff in the volunteer section, then include the title and excerpt on the static Volunteer page (you'd have to remember to rebuild it). So the page would still be mostly static and have a unique template from the rest of the categories, but include MT content.

Am I being over-complicated? Email me and tell me the right way to do it: look@recursion.org