Thread

Hey folks.  I’m looking at the new release of the MT 4 beta, and I’d like to know from among those who have explored it, are any features or abilities in it that you wish were in EE?

I want to keep this thread from becoming a “EE is better” thread. I’m just interested in what this new version of MT has that EE might be able to benefit from including in the next release, or perhaps things that enterprising third-party developers could bring across.

Beta 6 announcement and a list of some of the new features in MT4.

TTFN
Travis

I haven’t tested, but this feature is something I would love to see in EE too:

A powerful and simple re-sizable WYSIWYG Editor, with automatic saving of drafts of entries and templates—never lose a half-written post again

I have yet to see a WYSIWYG editor that works properly in Safari.  I would be interested to see if this one does.

Jamie

I haven’t tested, but this feature is something I would love to see in EE too:

A powerful and simple re-sizable WYSIWYG Editor, with automatic saving of drafts of entries and templates—never lose a half-written post again

The recommended solution to this, as I have asked for this a few times, is a 3rd-party publishing tool. On a Mac, you have several options available, including MarsEdit and Ecto.

I have yet to see a WYSIWYG editor that works properly in Safari.  I would be interested to see if this one does.

This one works in Safari: http://editor.asbrusoft.com/. (NOT freeware btw)

Now if someone could build a nice extension for it…

Cocaholic,

Just curious, have you used the asbrusoft editor in a live situation? The demo looks impressive but wondering what real world use is like.

Seems buggy to me.  After clicking around for a bit in the demo it stopped responding though Safari didn’t crash the code running the interface seemed to have done so.

However, its the closest I’ve ever seen anyone get to a real WYSIWYG editor for Safari.

Jamie

@Leslie,

Nope, never really used it.

Being an HTML/CSS coder myself I detest WYSIWYG editors!
I rather spent time to educate my clients to use some pMcode and HTML…

I did buy a license for it though, a long time ago…

Ok, gonna try to get this back on-topic, so it’s not another religious “WYSIWYG editor suck/don’t suck or should/should not be built-in to EE” debate…

That said, my opinion is that a built-in WYSIWYG editor (configurable so you could turn it off, if you wanted) would be fantastic and the MT4 bullet item on this sounds awesome.

Sorry, anyway…

I like all the “getting to know your blog” features in MT4. IMO, EE shouldn’t even list “stats” in their features list. I always tell clients to ignore it. Raw template/entry views (as opposed to distinct visits) are useless. Thing is, I don’t think I’d want all this built-in to EE. There are plenty of very capable free/for-fee analytics solutions out there…

The “smart template language” sounds nice, but I have no problems with EE’s except for the no custom field support (without Huot’s extension).

“Full Backup and Restore—securely archives all your entries, comments, images, files, settings, and templates for safekeeping” YES!!!

Well, one point could be mentioned about the stats. Nobody who has any concern with accuracy should ever use those online stats analytics like Google. They’re horribly inaccurate. I did a 90 day comparison of Google analytics versus log parsing with AWStats and Webalizer, and Google was as much as 30% off. The busier the site, the worse it was.

If you want stats, and real stats, log parsers are the only way to get real numbers.

Except that on-site stats tend to be pretty unreliable as well, when you take the spam problem into account.

Spam traffic is extremely easily filtered. My guess is that most stats software does it automatically.

Not most of the ones I’ve played with. Zillions of fake entries.

AWStats ignores them by default. hits are irrelevant anyway, which is what they’d show up as. Pageviews and unique visitors is what it’s important to track. None of those would appear as pageviews.

I’m sure it depends on the software, but any mainstream parser would most likely block them by default.

I know for sure awstats can be configured to manage things in almost unlimited configurations, including ignoring hits from yourself.

if your stats program shows those fake hits you need to find another program.

FYI I have a script site that shows referrer lists. you place code on your site and it reports all your referrers in real-time on your site. The difference between those spam scripts and real traffic is how they visit the site. It doesn’t even take a filter to block them, they’re just ignored.

www.e-referrer.com is the URL, so I do know without question they’re easily ignored.

In MT4 Whats New? it is interesting that they are focussing on being a ‘social media platform’.

I like the fact they have:

# OpenID integration.
We have a plugin for this yet, or did I miss it?

# Powerful profile pages for every user in your system
Seems like they offer more out of the box than EE currently - inc. place to share favourite entries, videos, photos.

# A ratings framework that lets users rate any item in the system—entries, comments, and in the future even authors or entire blogs
I know EE has modules for this but am intrigued that they have a ‘framework’ and what this means practically.

MT4 seems to have been getting a lot of favourable press even though EE features etc seem to be much more expansive. The only area I see EE falling down in comparison is the user profile, friending, favouriting etc (the social stuff, stopping short of giving everyone a blog).