Happy Monday, folks! I’m sure by now you’ve heard the big news: Six Apart bought Pownce. The Pownce team will join 6A, and the Pownce service will shut down. It’s a shame they’re closing the site — it had some really nice features. Hopefully, we’ll see some of those social networking and microblogging features show up in a future version of Movable Type.
Speaking of MT versions, MT 4.23 — the security fix that I told you was coming over a month ago — has finally been released. This is just a security fix, so it should be an easy upgrade. If you’re using the community templates, though, you will need to update those.
Themes
Mike T. released three new themes on his MT Styles blog. If you’re looking for a new design for your blog, be sure to check out Legal Gavel, Metamorph Florist, and Metamorph Cell.
Tutorials
Chad Everett wrote instructions for creating an alternate MT-Notifier request template. This allows you to better integrate MT-Notifier into your site. While you’re there, be sure to get the latest release of MT-Notifier, which came out this week.
Plugins
Access Counter — Masato Mori released this plugin to let you track the number of times a post is visited, and even sort posts by access count.
TemplateSetExporter — This is an updated version from Mokokazu Sekine. TemplateSetExporter lets you export a group of templates as a template set that can be imported on other blogs. The plugin is only in Japanese, but it looks fairly straightforward.
Notifixious — This plugin will notify your readers via IM, email, or SMS whenever you publish a new post. Written by Julien Genestoux, this sounds perfect for sending instant updates. Thanks, Julien!
FormatStack — Ever wish you could combine multiple text formatters to apply to the same block of text? Alan M. Carroll did, so he wrote a plugin to do it. Be sure to check out the examples to see just how powerful this plugin could be.
HashTag — Released by Rob Kenny, this plugin can post a link to your blog entry on Twitter and automatically include a hashtag to identify it.
And finally, a good reason to install the HashTag plugin: HashMT. Built by Jesse Gardner, HashMT aggregates posts on Twitter that include the #mt tag. This is a great new way to follow what’s going on in the Movable Type community.
What have you done with Movable Type lately? Let us know in the comments.
