Movable Type Monday: Clean Sweep, RF2CF and MTOS Translations
Last week saw the release of some awesome plugins (one that has been long-awaited by the community) as well as a new beta release for the next version of Movable Type and lively discussion on the MTOS mailing lists, especially in area of translations.
Welcome to Movable Type Monday!
MTOS Community Updates
CleanSweep: Early last week, Byrne Reese released an update to his Clean Sweep – a plugin that sounds like a must have for almost every blogger. In his own words:
Clean Sweep is a plugin I released in conjunction with Movable Type 4.0 to help users keep URLs and permalinks valid on their web site even after a major change to your URL structure. The plugin worked by tracking broken links on your web site and allowing you to create rewrite rules within Movable Type for those broken links.
In his announcement entry, Byrne talks about how Clean Sweep helped him manage his site along with the new features in the latest version (including mapping old MT URL formats to knew ones).
RF2CF: Chad Everett of Everitz Consulting released a long awaited update to his RF2CF plugin which allows people who use the Right Fields plugin to upgrade to MTOS 4.x with its built-in support for Custom Fields (via the Commercial Pack). The latest version of the plugin includes support for migrating RightFields users who used custom SQL datasources and file upload fields as well as makes the whole process a lot more stable and reliable.
The response he received to the plugin on the MTOS-dev mailing list shows how much this plugin was needed and removes one of the last remaining hurdles people had for embracing MTOS 4.x!
Polish, Russian and Italian Translations: There was a tremendous amount of activity on the MTOS-translators mailing list with Patryk Ściborek beginning work on a Polish Translation and Mirco Macrelli updating his Italian translation.
Alex Demidov also linked to the Russian translation now found on Google Code. Screencasts of the translation in action can be found on movabletype.ru, where the founder of the Russian translation project, Andrey Serebryakov, blogs about Movable Type and the Russian community.
On MT Feed Support: Following a lively debate on the MTOS-dev mailing list, Tim Appnel posted a follow-up on why the decision to only provide an Atom Feed by default from he next version of MTOS was a wise decision.
MTOS Beta Test Updates
Beta 5: Beta 5 was released early last week and according to Byrne Reese, Movable Type product manager, should be the last beta release. Release Candidates should begin to appear starting this week! Perusing the changelog, the most exciting change with this beta is the integration of Widget Manager. Widgets are now just another type of template! As a result, you can now have global widgets too (i.e. a common set of widgets that can be used on every blog on the system).
Generating a Changelog: Byrne Reese also documented the process of creating a changelog from the code repository on the MTOS Wiki. This is extremely useful when you’ve checked something out directly from the repository (rather than downloading one of the official beta releases) and want to get a list of changes since the last time you updated