It was a slow day so I decided to cross one thing off my to-do list, and that’s getting Typo installed and migrating from WordPress. I’ve been looking at getting Typo installed for awhile ever since I saw (and liked) its AJAX-y comments form, plus Typo 4 being just released did help.

The install went straightforward enough, though I didn’t get to try out the new installer gem. I didn’t bother because I’m on a Dreamhost shared hosting account, though installing the gem without root privileges seems like it should work. I simply followed this guide to getting Typo 4 running on Dreamhost. Ran into some trouble running the WordPress import script (found in /db/converters/wordpress2.rb), but Google turned up the solution (basically a patch to the Articles model that tries to send pings when importing posts). This should already be fixed in Typo SVN, but it’s not in release 4.0.

Anyhow, Typo seems spiffy, though I am still getting the occasional “Application Error”, but that’s most likely a Dreamhost thing. Liking the near-minimalist theme as well – I’m already missing the green clover though heh.

Things I’m already liking:

• Sidebar modules that you can add to your blog – for example, getting the del.icio.us links I have at the side to show is just a matter of dragging the del.icio.us sidebar item to the “Active” list and pointing it to my del.icio.us feed. There’re sidebar items for Flickr, tags, 43things, Amazon, and even the categories and archives are sidebar items.
  

  
  

• A Blacklist section where you can enter blacklisted words and regexes! Take that texas holdem poker!
• Live preview of your posts as you type – can get a little sluggish though.
• The ability to search and delete all comments – WordPress was missing that and running SQL statements in phpmyadmin stopped being fun.
• The nice Scribbish theme that comes with the Typo package.

Things that I don’t like:

• Linking to uploaded files was confusing. I like the whole “Attachments” idea, but I didn’t know how to link to them until I browsed to the Resources section and copied the link to the image I just uploaded (by saving the post I was making – there wasn’t a way to upload an attachment while writing the post).
  

  
  

  I’m probably doing things the wrong way though, seeing as this is way too obtuse. Would be nice to see improvements (such as, upload file as you write your post, click on uploaded file to include into post, all on the same page with AJAX).

• Um, nothing further!

Need to use it more to decide whether I’ll like this or not.