Happy Monday, folks! Big news this week: Six Apart announced the beta for Movable Type 5. The plan is to have a two month beta period, with the release coming sometime in November. Let’s take a look at some of the big new features in MT 5:
* Websites — MT 5 will have the concept of a website, which includes blogs and pages. This makes it more of a CMS, and makes it much simpler to use MT to maintain your entire site.
* Revision History — Entries, pages, and templates will all maintain a revision history. I’m particularly excited about this feature. The ability to modify templates, and return to previous version, is very useful.
* Custom Fields — Custom fields are now available on more objects and can be imported and exported. Plus, you can map them to a category/folder, so that they only appear if an entry/page is within that category/folder.
* Themes — MT 5 will have a whole new theme engine, which allows the bundling of templates, CSS, images, etc. together as a complete website theme.
…and lots more. MT5 will be a huge change from previous versions, pushing the platform more towards a CMS and further away from being a personal blog engine. We should get more details about these other changes in the coming months.
Also this week, Byrne Reese released a new beta of his Media Manager plugin. This release fixes problems caused by Amazon changing their API.
And finally, Bill Hartzer wrote a piece about search engine optimization for blogs. Bill covers some general guidelines, along with some specifics about MT. There’s some good information here, with links to other resources. Note: As noted in the comments, this is apparently an old article. My apologies for not reviewing it more closely.
What have you done with MT lately? Let us know in the comments.
Author: Billy Mabray
Billy Mabray is a web developer in the publishing industry. Over the years, he’s written with and developed for just about every blogging platform there is. Blogging is in his blood, but the doctors think he can live a normal life anyway.
You might want to take a harder look at Mr. Hartzer.
Wow, that is uncanny, Su.
Su, I’m not sure what you’re getting at. I wrote a “how to optimize your blog” article a while back that apparently a lot of people thought was interesting enough to either link to it or even talk about it or replicate the article on their own site.
Optimizing a blog is just like optimizing other sites, title tags, meta descriptions, and the content must be unique. If you’re duplicating your blog posts over and over again in your categories, archives, and tags pages then that’s not a good thing.
I think you know precisely what I’m getting at. It’s up to Billy to decide what to do about it. If the post at Tempered is the original, by you, then you have nothing to worry about, right? But maybe this version dated 2006 rather than last week is the original? That would at least explain all the laughably outdated information. Or maybe it’s this one from 2008?
Su, thanks for the catch. I goofed, I should have reviewed that article more closely. I’ll try to do better next time. Sorry everybody.