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.
