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Movable Type Monday: Movable Type Day, PostOffice and MTOS 4.15b4

Movable Type Monday: Movable Type Day, PostOffice and MTOS 4.15b4

When writing last week’s Movable Type Monday, I decided to save a few items for this week to prevent them from getting overshadowed by Six Apart’s announcement of their new Services and Media divisions. This week, I’ll be looking at a number of exciting plugins that have released, the announcement of MT Day as well as some of the new features in the latest MT 4.15 beta.

Welcome to another Movable Type Monday!

MTOS Community Updates

Movable Type Day: Niall Kennedy announced the first Movable Type Day to the MTOS-dev last week. The first in-person meeting of the MTOS community will be held on Friday, May 30 in the San Francisco Public Library. A tentative schedule featuring some proposals for presentations is already available as well as information on accommodation and transportation. Be sure to RSVP if you can make it!

PostOffice: PostOffice is a new plugin from Six Apart (but not yet officially released!) that finally creates a seamless moblogging experience for Movable Type. Although there have been several scripts to do this for a number of years, PostOffice is perhaps the most elegant solution so far. Su has written some documentation for the plugin and provides a bookmarklet to download the plugin from Trac until it is officially released!

NotifyReplyee: Patrick Benny released a new plugin that compliments the new comment threading feature found in Movable Type 4 (and improved in 4.15!). NotifyReplyee allows you to automatically send an email to the “replyee” notifying them about the reply. Check the plugin’s page for more information as well as screenshots.

Responder: Mike T has released an intriguing new plugin for MTOS. Responder brings feed reading functionality to Movable Type and provides a convenient widget that will display the newest posts on the dashboard. What really interests me about this plugin is its integration with the entry editor which provides a new way to respond to posts found on other blogs. In Mike’s words

I wanted a dialog in the entry editor that would show you someone else’s entries, and then allow you to import the text as you desired, so that you could respond to one of their blog posts.

Action Stream Plugins: Action Streams is one of my favourite plugins for Movable Type. Written by Mark Paschal, it allows you to aggregate your activity from around the Internet (from del.icio.us to Facebook). One of the best parts of Action Streams is the fact that you can build plugins for it (plugins for plugins!) to allow it to work with other services. John Eckman did just that, creating a plugin that works with TripIt. Dan Wolfgang also updated his Amazon Wishlist action streams plugin which allows you to aggregate data from your Amazon Wishlist.

MTOS 4.15 Beta Test Updates

Professional Pack Beta: A beta release for the Professional Pack was released last week, the biggest feature being the ability to store custom fields data in custom tables – a feature that many sorely lacked after the CustomFields plugin was acquired by Six Apart.

Beta 4 Released: Beta 4 in the MTOS 4.15 beta test was released this week. A changelog has been posted and contains some interesting tidbits, including the following features and notable bug fixes:

See Also
YouTube features for Content Creators

Pluralization of Count Tags: The latest beta contains a lovely feature that will make template code far cleaner. Pluralization of Count Tags explains three new attributes added to all Count tags that allow you to define what is displayed when the count is zero, singular (one) and plural. This removes the need for nasty nested ifs that we’d previously need to use. A most welcome change indeed!

Updates to Interface: Beta 4 contains more improvements to the user interface. Six Apart incorporated much of the feedback they received regarding the new template listing screen. One of the biggest complaints was the time it took, waiting for a page refresh, to filter the listing (such that only templates of a certain type were displayed at once). Beta 4 introduces a slick new filtering system that filters on-the-fly.

New Developer Features: A pretty major change was made to how metadata is stored in the database (making the new ProPack possible). Metadata is now stored in a separate table. Mark Paschal elaborates on MTOS-dev explaining how plugin authors can take advantage of this new functionality.

Cleverer Loop Glues: A pet peeve of mine has finally been fixed in the latest beta. Loop tags in Movable Type could optionally be given a glue attribute that allowed you to join items together with some text. An annoying side-effect was that blank items were also joined together (which often resulted in some odd display). This bug, amongst a long list of others, has been fixed!

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  • Action Streams is my absolute favorite too. I actually managed to combine my actions streams with my full blog postings on my blog. Do you have an idea, when version 1.1 is planned. It should have this feature natively.

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