Happy Monday, folks! Lots of people are talking about Six Apart’s announcement at WordCamp Mid-Atlantic. The makers of Movable Type are reaching out to WordPress users by releasing two WP plugins. The first is Typepad Connect, which allows a blog to accept Google Connect, Facebook Connect, and many other authentication systems. The other is Typepad Antispam, Six Apart’s comment spam blocker, similar to Akismet.
It’s an interesting move by 6A. Some people are calling this a win for WP over MT, but I really don’t see that. Automattic sponsored the first Akismet plugin for MT, and that wasn’t considered a concession. Over the past few years, 6A has made it clear that while MT is one of their products, their overall business is blogging. It makes sense that they would try to extend their reach into other platforms. I have no idea if they’ll have any success with Typepad Connect on WP, but I’d wager Typepad Antispam will win them some converts. I’ve used both it and Akismet, and Typepad does a far better job of identifying spam for me.
Other items of interest this week:
Byrne Reese is working on a jQuery plugin that provides an interface into MT blogs. As he writes in the documentation:
The interface is responsible for rendering sign in/out/up links on a page based upon the state of a user’s session. It exposes event handlers for authentication events so that developers can bind to the DOM handers that respond to a user logging in or out.
The idea is for this to eventually replace the default JavaScript in MT templates. I’m a big fan of jQuery, so I’m looking forward to this.
Chad Everett has an update to MT-Notifier, his blog notification plugin. This version, 4.2.2, includes the following changes:
- Added blog id to loading of record data to ensure consistency
- Added check for duplicate emails being sent to the same address
- Added more template information for plugin data
- Enhanced request.tmpl with footer include to ease customization
- Standardized on using routines for version information and moved to Util.pm
- Updated logic for naming conventions
Additionally, Chad wrote a tutorial describing how to send HTML notifications with MT-Notifier. This is a feature being considered for a future version of MT-Notifier, but until then this easy to follow tutorial will show you what you need to do.
Next, we have a couple of items from Mike T. at Code Monkey Ramblings. First, a new style for the Movable Type Professional Set. This is another in Mike’s line of WP themes converted to MT template sets. Nice work, Mike.
Second, Mike wrote a tutorial on how to add a navigation bar to the Classic Blog template set. His post covers both the CSS and the MT code you’ll need to make this work on your blog.
Finally, there’s been a lot of talk in the MT community about a bug found in the latest version of MT. This bug can occur when trying to filter entries by a category that has spaces and/or ampersands in its name. The fix for this will be in the next version of MT, but if you can’t wait till then there is a patch available.
What have you done with MT lately? Let us know in the comments.
Do you truly know yourself?
Your FREE personalized Moon Reading explores the secret depths of your personality, relationships and true purpose in life.
