Tobias’ work on typo looks really nice, with the release of typo 2.0 he’s added som killer features. I’m reasonably happy with wordpress, however its php code is a little messy, and I have to run a number of hacks to get the site running as I’d expect. While I’m not necessarily going to make the move, there are some things that typo could do to make porting easier. Support external IDs & Custom 404 handling.

I publish Atom feeds, these contain an <atom:id> element which uniquely identifies my entries. If I upgrade to another publishing tool, I have to keep all these IDs the same unless I want my readers to see every item as ‘new’. The easiest way to support this is to have another attribute on Entry models called ‘external id’ which contains the ID I stick in <atom:id>. If the <atom:id> element is generated from other data, then when I upgrade my readers get annoyed. This problem would apply if I were serving up RSS feeds too, the <guid> element serves the same purpose.

Finally, I have a number of inbound links that still generate significant (for me) traffic. I’d love it if I could find a blogging tool that would let me map arbitrary URLs to pages. That way all my old 1.html links & my pre-wordpress cruft-free-urls can be handled in the application rather than my current 2k .htaccess file.

Anyways, I guess the easiest way to get these features is to implement them myself, perhaps I should talk with Tobias about that…