SmartyPants gets a makeover
Posted by Daniel Stout on Sat 18 Mar 2006 at 10:41 AM
Movable Type users who care about typography have a new friend in their corner. For years, John Gruber’s SmartyPants plugin has been the solution of choice for crafting typographically correct quotes (that is, “smart” quotes), apostrophes, m-dashes, and more. One point of contention though is that SmartyPants, being something of a generic plugin, didn’t support Movable Type’s dynamic publishing through PHP.
Six Apart had a post yesterday about a variety of new MT plugins. Lots of good new functionality. But the one I really noticed was DynamicSmartyPants. Basically, it allows one to take the original SmartyPants plugin and use it with PHP. Awesome.
I’m glad this functionality has been added, but I must admit to being partial to static archives. Our HTML pages load fast—a lot faster than PHP pages. WordPress pages take something like 7 to 9 database accesses just to create a page. That’s a lot of overhead.
I thought it funny when Jeffrey Zeldman moved to WordPress and highlighted that he was getting typographic controls built-in instead of having to use a plugin, but then he linked to a plugin for WP that allowed caching of pages. I would rather add a plugin to control something like typographically correct quotes rather than be using a system that would require a plugin just to get over the inherent inefficiences of that system. Movable Type is lightning fast. WordPress is…?
Tags: dynamic smartypants · movable type · smartypants · wordpress
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WordPress is…?
Thanks, Faust. Everybody seems to be using WordPress these days, but I still think Movable Type is the premier tool for blogging. It has a lot of power, and like you say, flexibility. I'm glad the option for dynamic archives is there, and with DynamicSmartyPants it's much more appealing to me. But overall the static HTML pages work just too well to give that up.
I just started playing with Movable Type’s dynamic publishing. I think that I am going to find it very useful, especially when using Movable Type less as a blog and more as a general content management system. Right now my biggest stumbling block is that if you have done anything interesting with plugins or embedded PHP code, moving back and forth between static and dynamic publishing isn't going to be as easy as flipping a switch. It will likely require using different templates for static and dynamic publishing, not using several useful plugins, customizing mtview.php, not embeddeding PHP, or writting your own plugins.