Happy Monday, folks, and a happy 7th birthday to Movable Type. Looking back through my old blog posts, it looks like I’ve been using MT for about 5.5 of those years. I remember that first installation well — I converted from my hand-rolled system to MT in the hallways of the Austin Convention Center during my first SXSW. There were some hiccups, but I was happy with the results and I’ve been using MT for various projects ever since.
While we wait for someone to bring us some birthday cake, let’s see what’s been going on in the Movable Type Community.
Plugins
MT-Notifier — Chad Everett released an update to MT-Notifier, a popular plugin which notifies users of new posts, new comments, and more.
Do Not Upgrade — Beau Smith mentioned a plugin created by Brad Choate which keeps MT from running an upgrade. I have to admit, my first reaction on reading that was, “huh?” but apparently Beau needed it for a project. I’d be interested to hear more about the problem this solves.
Photo Gallery — Byrne Reese has updated his Photo Gallery plugin to work with MT 4.2. Besides upgrading the templates, Byrne has made a lot of interface enhancements that make this plugin much easier to use.
Tips & Tricks
Byrne’s been busy this week. Besides his release of Photo Gallery, he published a short tutorial demonstrating how to use caching in MT to maintain a Google Sitemap. It’s a good example of using caching to reduce your normal publishing time. Also, Byrne released two slide decks with lots of good information for developing on MT:
Michele Neylon points us to a Custom Google Search created by Jay Allen for searching all Movable Type documentation. Very handy.
Mike T. helps us out with one of the new features in MT 4.2, threaded comments. He provides the full template code needed to implement the feature. Thanks, Mike!
On Tildemark blogs, a recent post explains how to create a more compact display of monthly and yearly archives. It looks great — something I should probably experiment with myself.
Finally, since this is MT’s birthday, we have a couple of retrospectives. Toni Hambilton writes about her love affair with MT since first installing it many years ago. Her experience was very similar to mine. And, Thomas Arie Setiawan takes a look back at his own history with MT through his blog posts over the past five years.
What have you done with Movable Type 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.
