Seems the MT 3.0 alpha testing has started on time afterall according to Anil Dash of Six Apart. They just didn’t bother to mention it until people started complaining about the lack of news. With any luck it’ll only be a couple of weeks before it’s available to more people to try out and we’ll begin to get some feedback on it.

In the meantime I continue to toy with possible alternatives to MT. I installed the e107.org CMS to play with then yanked it to install Drupal to play with only to yank that and re-install e107 again. I’m also still experimenting with using the Invision Board I have set up for the SEB forums as the engine for my site and I managed to find a set of scripts that would make importing data from the forums into a front page for SEB child’s play.

I managed to whip up a test page that shows what it might be like which you can check out by clicking here if you want to see the potential. Keep in mind that I haven’t edited the style sheets for the import script so the text boxes look a little funky, but that’s just aesthetics. All in all, it works pretty well and there are options for importing topics, replies, polls and more. I’d lose the pinging of sites like blo.gs or blogrolling.com and trackbacks wouldn’t be possible to my site, though I could still manually trackback to other blogs. Beyond that, though, you’d be able to subscribe to particular entries without any additional plugins and even to whole categories. No need for clunky smilie implementations and there are additional scripts that would put a login box on the main page as well as provide for RSS feeds of the site and the commenting system would suddenly become a lot more robust.

Hmmm. Decisions, decisions… Sometimes I hate myself because of crap like this.