Last weekend I was given a sharp reminder of the dangers of forking, modifying and otherwise patching a project.
For some time now I've been disgruntled with the amount of comment spam getting through requiring moderation or deletion. It turns out there's a nice captcha plugin based on recaptcha, but some tweaks are required to make it work. Unfortunately the tweaks didn't work out of the box, and as I was also getting annoyed with the look and feel of the blog, I rashly decided to apply one of the shiny themes that come with Movable Type. Big mistake: the indexes looked lovely, but the individual entry pages looked quite awful, with broken styling and half my meta content missing.
At this point I recalled that in the last 5 years or so I've tweaked, patched and otherwise mutilated my Movable Type templates and CGIs. It's great - I can make the blog look however I like. But because I'm no longer using the baseline code, the MT themes do not apply cleanly and there's no guarantee of compatibility with the rest of the MT community.
I managed to back out the style changes by crawling through backups, but if I want to get the whizzy new templates and captcha stuff, I need to do more work. So I now face the tedious task of either reverse-engineering my changes and applying them to the current MT, or ditching my customisations in favour of progress and finding a way to make the most recent MT display the content I want - neither of which I have time to do right now.
So, anyway: having the source code is good, being able to change the code is good. Forking is bad.
Now things are sort-of fixed, I can get on and write all the other stuff I've been meaning to post for, like, forever (at least a couple of days).
Posted by savs at November 18, 2008 3:16 PM