Movable Type Monday: jQuery Comments, Asset Listings, Safari Support, and More
Happy Monday, folks! Things seem to be a bit slow in the Movable Type community right now. I think it’s a combination of the holidays and impending release of MT5. Still, we’ve got a few news items to tell you about.
Mike from Code Monkey Ramblings has forked Byrne Reese’s jQuery Comment plugin. This doesn’t seem to be a radical departure from the original. Instead, Mike has concentrated on small tweaks that improve the plugin and extend its compatibility with existing themes.
On the admin side of MT, Beau Smith has written a tutorial on sorting the assets on the Entry Edit screen by title. In the post, Beau talks about sorting by “filename,” but from the code it’s clear what he meant was the user-editable label for the asset (which defaults to filename), rather than the actual name of the file on disk. Regardless, it’s a handy hack for making the Edit Entry screen a little easier to use.
Last week, I told you about a designer seminar being hosted by the Melody Project. If you didn’t get to watch, they’ve posted slides, audio, and some of the Q&A from the presentation.
Looking for an easier way to install MT? This week I’ve got two. First, if you use Sun’s OpenSolaris, you can now find MT in the “contrib” repository. And, MT is now available as a Turnkey Linux appliance that can be used in many different virtual environments, including Amazon EC2.
Finally, there’s been discussion this week about MT’s support for Safari. Six Apart‘s official stance is that MT should work in Safari, but their QA department doesn’t test in that browser — they only test in IE6+ and Firefox 3.5+. Since QA doesn’t test it, they don’t officially support it.
As far as testing suites go, this does seem insufficient. WebKit-based browsers are becoming more prevalent, so you’d think they’d at least test in Safari so they could have a good feel for how it works in Chrome, MobileSafari, etc. I can understand the decision — with limited resources, you test what paying (i.e. enterprise) customers are most likely to use. I just don’t think it’s the right decision.
What have you done with MT lately? Let us know in the comments.
Thanks for the note Billy. When I started writing the entry, my goal was simpler. I’ve updated the title to reflect the nature of the content:
Hack Movable Type app to order assets by asset label