failing like never before

Migrated to WordPress

A little more then a week ago, Typo 5.0 was released. Shortly after that, version 5.0.1 was released to fix a bug, and the next day after the 5.0.1 release Typo version 5 was pulled from the mirrors because of a critical bug that would result in the application purging the blog's database. I upgraded to 5.0 almost as soon as it first came out but downgraded back to 4.1.1 as soon as I heard about the new bug.

But even with version 4.1.1 I experienced numerous problems with Typo. In December of 2007, 21.1% of all the HTTP error codes returned by my server, were 500 (Internal Server) errors. In one month alone, the Typo application on my domain experienced 208 internal server errors. I've experienced many of these before. Occasionally, after writing a new post up in the admin section, I would click the “submit” button only to get a 500 error. Or I might be on the home page and click on a category link, again, only to get a 500 error. Most of the times, these errors would disappear once I hit the back button in my browser and tried clicking on the link a second time. But these were aggravating errors and shouldn't have been popping up in a stable application release.

Also, although the themes in Typo's theme gallery are labeled as “working,” many of them did not work at all. A common problem, was that the “live search” function was not implemented properly. After text had been entered into the “live search” search bar, a request would be sent to the server, and the server would send back results which were then displayed in the web page. But, the search results would only be displayed for a mere second, before they were then pulled immediately from the web page. I also found one theme that looked absolutely lovely, but didn't display any of the posts (which completely ruined the theme for me). Some themes, didn't work with pagination, and others wouldn't allow comments to be added. Many of the issues were easily fixed, but it was really quite annoying to have to bother with these things. I switched to Typo because it offered more functionality then my home-made CMS and looked much nicer. I wanted a blog CMS that Just Works(TM) but Typo was just too unfinished and rough for me to really like, so I had to pick something else.

After spending a lot of time with Google, I fnally decided on using WordPress. There are a lot of discussions on the internet as to which is better, Typo or Wordpress. It didn't seem to me as though either one was favored disproportionately, but in general, many people seemed to feel that WordPress had more polish. After trying WordPress out for a wee bit, I was in love. Its lean and fast (whereas Typo is a fatty and couldn't outrun a snail), has a vast theme gallery, is amazingly easy to install, and is dead stable. I have yet to have a 500 error under WordPress (even though I've only been running it for a few days now).

WordPress pwns. Typo is popular because of all the buzz behind Rails, but it just doesn't have what it takes to be a really good blog application.