LifeType is the blogging engine that I have been using for two years now, and which I am now leaving, in favor of WordPress.
Unfortunately, I must admit that LifeType has been a true disappointment to me. And I say this from a number of reasons.From a developer's point of view, it is nothing more than an overkill. How else can you call a blogging engine with 530+ classes?? It is horribly cumbersome, and provides a lot of rarely used features. Yes, the code has great concepts, design patterns, abstractions, object-orientedness... beautiful, sure, but oversized.
From a plugin writer's plugin, it is just a nightmare. To write a simple shoutbox plugin, you must roll up ELEVEN classes, for a total of 1007 lines of pure code (not counting templates). 1000 lines for a trivial shoutbox, when all the actions you do is get a post, save to db, and show past items?? Absurd. You have to inherit from so many classes and manage so many details, that once you have completed it, you don't know exactly where to look when something goes wrong, not to mention expanding it.From a project manager's point of view, my feeling is that it remained a one-person project, and not a community-driven, serious, open-source commitment. The developer's mailing lists are completely dead. There is a dev's forum, but it is starving as well. And the "Development" section of the site states that: "The best way to keep in touch with the developer is to join the project mailing lists"... So where is the development discussion going on? Where are the project plans? What is the future roadmap?
From a blogger's perspective, there are usability bugs in the admin area which have never been addressed. For example, there is no place where you can see all the recent comments, and moderate them. Five most recent are shown in the dashboard, but if you have more of them, you have to browse through all the posts! Another example: when you upload a resource (say an image), what you do next is that you need to put a link to it in some post. To do so, you have to open the album, but there the thumbnails are ordered in ascending order, instead of descending, and you have to browse through all the pages to get the latest one: why not directly show the latest images on top? Moreover, you cannot click on the resoure as soon as the page loads: you have to wait, until all the thumbnails are loaded as well, since the page has dynamic height, and as soon as one thumbnail loads its bottom goes under the visible window area, and you have to scroll again.And last, but maybe this was the first reason to switch, my home directory went almost 50MB. Where is the space gone? The same data, with WordPress, occupy only 5MB! Therefore... bye bye LifeType. I had a great time, but it's time to move on...
