The release of Movable Type 4.2 seems to have breathed new life into the Movable Type community as today’s post will reveal. The past week gave us a series of new proposals from the open source community (covering topics from new and deprecated templates tags to major code refactors), a number of new plugins (including several Action Stream plugins) and a slew of tutorials!
Welcome to Movable Type Monday! [Read more…]
It’s been a while since I last posted a Movable Type Monday (and during that time, I’ve been in three different countries!) and there’s been a lot of Movable Type activity! Most importantly, Movable Type 4.2 was released and introduced one of the largest licensing changes since the MT 3.0 debacle – the introduction of Movable Type Pro, what used to be two separate products (the professional pack and community solution) is now one, and is free for bloggers (which is another way of saying “unincorporated entities”).
Movable Type Pro lets you turn any site into a full social publishing platform, combining all of Movable Type’s abilities as a blogging and CMS with social networking features like profiles, ratings, user registration, forums, following, and more.
Another, less obvious, change was with the open source side – the name “Movable Type Open Source” seemed to generate a lot of confusion for new users and so, in an attempt to make things simpler, has been renamed to simply “Movable Type.”
Movable Type 4.2 was shortly followed by 4.21 after the community found and helped patch two important bugs that surfaced with 4.2. None-the-less, the response from the community has been overwhelmingly positive! [Read more…]
The last couple of weeks has seen a ton of exciting features being developed by the community including a polling plugin, a new plugin and tutorial for creating photo galleries as well as an alternate wysiwyg editor. A short conference call with the MTOS community was also hosted last week with discussion around the development of Movable Type 4.2 – especially highlighting the large role the community has played!
Welcome to Movable Type Monday!
This past week saw another round of incredible plugins being released with the majority focussed on integrating your Movable Type blog with third party services including FriendFeed, action stream plugins for BrightKite, Seesmic and Sporepedia! The bi-weekly Movable Type Conference Call was also held and featured updates about upcoming and future releases. Release Candidate 3 of the next version of Movable Type (and public betas of the Commercial and Community Solutions) was also released last week.
Welcome to Movable Type Monday!
Over the last couple of weeks, there has been renewed debate on the security of various blogging platforms. TechCrunch began the discussion by noting that WordPress has become a prime target for hackers. The author, Nik Cubrilovic, touched upon the slew of security releases WordPress frequently issues, the fact that it is often hard to identify that you have been hacked and concluded:
If you are currently not running the latest version of WordPress then there is a very high chance that your site has already been compromised.
A day late but this week’s Movable Type Monday is chock full of updates from the MTOS community including two ways of running Movable Type as a desktop application, two new plugins, updates from the biweekly conference call and an updated schedule for the release of the next version of MTOS with a second release candidate for MTOS 4.2.
Welcome to Movable Type Tuesday Monday!
The past week was, once again, an activity filled week for the MTOS community with a large number of plugins being released including a new rich text editor, a new custom field plugin as well as a photo editing plugin!
Welcome to Movable Type Monday!
This week saw an incredible amount of activity in the Movable Type community with a slew of new plugins (including new plugins for Action Streams) and tutorials (including a couple of pagination, an oft-requested feature!). By far the biggest was Six Apart’s announcement of TypePad Antispam as well as the rechristening of the next version of Movable Type as Movable Type 4.2.
There’s never been a better time to be a Movable Type user, welcome to Movable Type Monday!
My apologies for missing last week’s Movable Type Monday. Today, I’ll be highlighting a number of awesome new (and updated) plugins that have been released over the past two weeks (especially in the realm of geolocation) as well as a series of new proposals and updates to the documentation as we gear up for the release of the next version of Movable Type.
Welcome to Movable Type Monday!
[Read more…]
Last week saw the release of some awesome plugins (one that has been long-awaited by the community) as well as a new beta release for the next version of Movable Type and lively discussion on the MTOS mailing lists, especially in area of translations.
Welcome to Movable Type Monday!
CleanSweep: Early last week, Byrne Reese released an update to his Clean Sweep – a plugin that sounds like a must have for almost every blogger. In his own words:
Clean Sweep is a plugin I released in conjunction with Movable Type 4.0 to help users keep URLs and permalinks valid on their web site even after a major change to your URL structure. The plugin worked by tracking broken links on your web site and allowing you to create rewrite rules within Movable Type for those broken links.
In his announcement entry, Byrne talks about how Clean Sweep helped him manage his site along with the new features in the latest version (including mapping old MT URL formats to knew ones).
RF2CF: Chad Everett of Everitz Consulting released a long awaited update to his RF2CF plugin which allows people who use the Right Fields plugin to upgrade to MTOS 4.x with its built-in support for Custom Fields (via the Commercial Pack). The latest version of the plugin includes support for migrating RightFields users who used custom SQL datasources and file upload fields as well as makes the whole process a lot more stable and reliable.
The response he received to the plugin on the MTOS-dev mailing list shows how much this plugin was needed and removes one of the last remaining hurdles people had for embracing MTOS 4.x!
Polish, Russian and Italian Translations: There was a tremendous amount of activity on the MTOS-translators mailing list with Patryk Ściborek beginning work on a Polish Translation and Mirco Macrelli updating his Italian translation.
Alex Demidov also linked to the Russian translation now found on Google Code. Screencasts of the translation in action can be found on movabletype.ru, where the founder of the Russian translation project, Andrey Serebryakov, blogs about Movable Type and the Russian community.
On MT Feed Support: Following a lively debate on the MTOS-dev mailing list, Tim Appnel posted a follow-up on why the decision to only provide an Atom Feed by default from he next version of MTOS was a wise decision.
Beta 5: Beta 5 was released early last week and according to Byrne Reese, Movable Type product manager, should be the last beta release. Release Candidates should begin to appear starting this week! Perusing the changelog, the most exciting change with this beta is the integration of Widget Manager. Widgets are now just another type of template! As a result, you can now have global widgets too (i.e. a common set of widgets that can be used on every blog on the system).
Generating a Changelog: Byrne Reese also documented the process of creating a changelog from the code repository on the MTOS Wiki. This is extremely useful when you’ve checked something out directly from the repository (rather than downloading one of the official beta releases) and want to get a list of changes since the last time you updated
