Because I'm an insane idiot

Christian Crumlish

I'm downloading pMachine today and I'm going to see if it's really as easy to install as they say. It seems clear that pMachine is positioning itself as a competitor to Movable Type (it has import scripts for MT and GreyMatter), angling for those who prefer PHP over perl.

The implied architecture is impressive. The design seems to account for a broad range of content-management, community, calendar, and mail features on a common model. Some of it goes beyond what I'm interested in as a writer, but I did suddenly start imagining myself running all my sites with one single tool.

As someone who is still wrestling with httpd.conf and MT installation and RSS Monkey, the RSS parser feature in pMachine caught my eye. It doesn't come with the free version of the software, but the pro version is feature-complete and $45/noncommercial $125/commercial (very close to MT's "soft" price points). I'll report on this, amidst all my other jugglings.

I may have to try migrating a blog, because I don't think I can deal with starting any more just to explore software. The trickiest part is jumping from one interface to another, remembering "where did I put that?"

Final thought after touring pMachine's interface through screen shots: it appears to do just about everything I've ever been asked to spec out when gathering requirements for a custom CMS implementation. For $125, this could finally realign the CMS market along more rational lines.