Movable Type Monday: Publish Queue Manager, ShareThis, Security Issue

Billy Mabray

Oct. 27, 2008
1 min read

Happy Monday, folks! We told you last time about this being Movable Type’s 7^th birthday. The celebration concludes this week with a huge party at MT HQ. If you’re going to be in San Francisco, don’t miss it.

But before the party starts, we’ve got work to do. On with the MT news!

Plugins

Minifier — Hirotaka Ogawa released Minifier, which adds block tags for minifying CSS and JavaScript. If your CSS and JS files are already templates in your blog, this shouldn’t take you more than two minutes to set up and should significantly reduce download time for those files.

Action Streams Plugins — We’ve got two Action Streams plugins this week. First, Toni Hambilton provides a Joost plugin. It adds your activity from the Internet TV site to your activity stream. And from Jack Mottram we have a plugin for the BBC’s Radio Pop service.

Publish Queue Manager — Byrne Reese announced the release of Publish Queue Manager, a UI for managing the jobs in the publishing queue. PQ is very useful for large MT installations, and this plugin gives you more information about what’s running in the background. Additionally, PQ Manager gives you some control over those tasks, with more functions coming in future releases.

Selective Cloner — Mark Carey has released Selective Cloner, which will make a copy of a blog’s settings, permissions and templates, but none of the entries. There’ve been many times I needed a plugin like this — when creating a new blog that matched a previous blog, or simply for testing purposes. Thanks, Mark!

Feeds.App Lite — Tim Appnel has released his popular Feeds.App Lite as an open source project. Feeds.App Lite is the free version of Feeds.App, which helps you republish RSS and Atom feeds on your blog.

Tips & Tricks

Phil Gyford has a tip for anyone that’s had a long template truncated. I’m in that category, so I appreciate the explanation.

Toni Hambilton tells us how to use ShareThis with the new Mid-Century Template Set. Thanks, Toni!

Finally, a cross-site scripting vulnerability was found in Movable Type. SixApart has a fix, and should be releasing MT 4.23 sometime this week to deal with this issue and another that’s cropped up. Be sure to look for that.

What have you done with Movable Type lately? Let us know in the comments.

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.