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July 31, 2003
More Manila
In my continuing struggles with Manila/Frontier, I learned today that the documentation hasn't been updated since version 6. The product is currently at version 9. That is no small problem, since the thing is fucking complex. Look, I'm fairly smart about these things and I haven't been able to figure out how to export and import an existing site in two days of work now. Online explanations for this seem quite incompatible. It seems like a fairly serious problem that taking a Manila site from one server to another requires messing around in Frontier data tables (not to mention understanding what "pasting a website table into the root table" means).
And did you catch that? The user guide, the most extensive documentation I can find, is horribly out of date, contains no screen shots, and regularly refers to features that appear to have been changed. It's as if the UserLand programmers have just added features pretty much any time they wanted, to any part of the system they wanted, without any real attempt at consistency or appropriateness.
I'm sure I'll figure out what I need eventually, but I'm damn sure going to counsel clients against Frontier/Manila in the future.
Posted by Andrew at July 31, 2003 08:32 PM