Movable Type Monday: MT5 RC2, Melody, StumbleUpon, and More
Happy Monday, folks! This week, Six Apart put out the second release candidate for Movable Type 5. They mention a few highlights in the announcement, so let’s look at those here:
- A lot of work to get the dynamic publishing in sync with the static publishing.
- Updates to the Professional blog templates
- Unbundling of Motion and Action Streams
- The Entry/Page “previous” and “next” container tags now account for entries/pages with the same date-time, rather than skipping them.
The item on that list that catches my eye is the “unbundling” of Motion and the Action Streams plugin. This is the first I’ve heard of this. If you download the release candidate you’ll see that, sure enough, the Motion template set and the Action Streams plugin are gone. One has to wonder if this is the end of Motion or if it will be back as a separate plugin. If anybody’s heard more about this, let us know in the comments.
Over at the Melody Project, they’re making progess toward an initial release. To give people a sneak peak, they released a list of planned 1.0 features. Some of the more interesting ones include revision histories, a full-screen editor, and a smaller core. It’s good to see this project gaining momentum.
We’ve got one new plugin to talk about this week. Byrne Reese has developed a plugin that “provides integration with Stumple Upon’s URL shortening service and iframe viewing window.” On top of that, it makes it easy for you to host your own shortened URLs.
One of the scariest jobs you’re likely to have to do with your MT site is move it to another server. There are lots of ways to do it, each with its own advantages. Larry Sampas documented his latest server move. He did it using rsync, which is a great way to move the files between servers without downloading to a local machine.
Finally, Beau Smith has a tutorial on adding edit links to entries and pages. This method checks the user’s cookies to see if they’re logged in before displaying the links.
What have you done with MT lately? Let us know in the comments.
Believe it or not, this is the first I have heard of the unbundling of Motion and Action Streams. And when *I* don’t hear about these things… anyways. Most likely something I missed because they were there specifically because I was upgrading and old install that had them previously.
It makes perfect sense though.
1) Motion is a template set. Nothing more. So they probably ran out of time to update it to use the new theming infrastructure. Which, given that MT5 can import and export themes so easily is a damn shame, somewhat surprising and perhaps a little short-sighted given that Motion was the premiere MT theme to date.
That being said, Six Apart is no doubt trying to shuttle everyone over to TypePad Motion, so there being a Movable Type Motion product as well is almost certainly confusing. So they decided to axe it. Again, short sighted if that is the reason when they could have just renamed it.
2) Action Streams – MT Pro got really big in the last 12 months and the bigger it gets the harder it is becomes to release quality software on a timely schedule. So if Motion is out, then remove Action Streams as well.
What is disappointing is how poorly communicated these changes have been and scary that I learn it from The Blog Herald and not from them. It doesn’t take much to just mention it.