AutoSmileys — Sebastian Böthin has written a plugin that replaces text-based emoticons with images. The plugin comes with a default list of emoticons to replace, but you can customize that list as much as you want. And AutoSmileys can be used just about anywhere — entries, comments, pages, and more.

Garmin Connect Action Stream — Garmin Connect is a social training log that lets you track and share your training activities using Garmin GPS devices. This plugin from Scott Hill adds those activities to your Action Stream.

LimitTitle — François Nonnenmacher has written two of this week’s plugins. This first one enforces a maximum length for titles on entries and pages. This is particularly useful for blog editors that need to maintain some consistency amongst their authors.

AssetDuJour — François’s other plugin, AssetDuJour, helps you organize your uploaded files. Instead of all files going into a single folder, it organizes files by a date-based folder system.

MT-Twitter — Finally, this plugin from Brandon Fuller imports your Twitter posts into your Movable Type blog. While not a new plugin, the recent update was the first one in over two years. With this new version, the plugin settings are styled with the modern MT user interface. Brandon also fixed a bug with converting URLs into links.

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

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.

Byrne Reese has announced a new version of the Media Manager plugin. The previous version was broken by a change to Amazon’s API. Rather than patch the problem, Byrne did a major rewrite of the software to take advantage of an existing Amazon API library. As a result, folks upgrading from a previous version will likely need to update their templates.

Also this past week, Beau Smith published a tutorial on hacking MT to list pages by created date. This hack allows you to modify the MT admin so that the list of pages is sorted by their creation date. Why would you want to do this? As Beau explains, the “authored on” date is easily edited in batch mode, making it an easy way to create a custom sorted list of your pages.

Finally, the Melody Project is hosting an online designer training seminar. The seminar is December 16 at 10:00am PST, and will last about 45 minutes. From the announcement, topics covered will include:

• Creating, packaging, and distributing themes.
• The templating language.
• Custom theme options.
• Preferences bundles.
• Differences between Melody and Movable Type.

You’ll also have the opportunity to provide feedback to the development team.

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

Also for MT5, 6A’s Beau Smith wrote up a new installation and upgrade guide. This set of instructions covers a lot of different scenarios, with additional reference material so you understand what is going on. This is probably the most extensive installation documentation for MT I’ve ever seen. Good work, Beau.

Finally, 6A hosted a conference call last week to answer people’s questions about MT5. It’s worth listening to the whole thing, but here are some of the highlights:

• On why Motion was left out of MT5: A matter of time and resources. MT5 makes a lot of changes to the UI that were incompatible with the templates and plugins that make up Motion. The Motion theme, along with Action Streams and microblogging, will return, but no timeline has been set. Also, they felt that TypePad Motion was an acceptable alternative in the interim.
• MT5 Enterprise will not be released until sometime next year, probably the second half of 2010.
• They reiterated that the new Website object is required in MT5. You cannot create a Blog that is not a part of a Website.
• Users with Blog-level access will not see Website options.
• When you upgrade, Blogs will be combined into Websites based on the Blog URLs. You’ll then need to rename the Website and customize it as you like.
• The new theme, Pico, is a blog-only theme. It is not a full Website theme. The Professional Template Set has been upgraded to a Website theme.
• Another plugin that was removed due to time constraints was Zemanta. They hope to bring it back soon.
• The ability to login via Yahoo OpenID was removed. Apparently, Yahoo made a change to their service which broke the functionality. Although the change was minor (the domain changed), it was after a code freeze, so it was left out. It will be restored in the next release.
• There was a question of whether it would be necessary to do a wipe and install of MT5, instead of an upgrade. They said an upgrade should be fine, though if you have Motion and/or Action Streams installed you might have some issues with those.
• Licensing should be simpler than before, though how much an upgrade will cost will depend on what current license you have.
• Also, since upgrading MT5 could be daunting for a lot of users, 6A is planning to list developers that are “certified” to help with upgrades.

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

While Japan enjoys MT5, everyone can try Asset Gallery 1.2 from Endevver. Asset Gallery lets you embed slideshows in entries, user profiles, or pages. And it includes lots of options for customizing the look of your slideshows. Better still, Endevver is releasing it as an open source project.

Finally, Dax from GuruLabs posted instructions for resetting MT passwords using SQL. Dax includes instructions for both MySQL and PostgreSQL. If you just need to reset one password, it’s probably easier to do it from the MT admin. But if you needed to update several users at once, this would be much faster.

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

• A lot of work to get the dynamic publishing in sync with the static publishing.
• Updates to the Professional blog templates
• Unbundling of Motion and Action Streams
• The Entry/Page “previous” and “next” container tags now account for entries/pages with the same date-time, rather than skipping them.

The item on that list that catches my eye is the “unbundling” of Motion and the Action Streams plugin. This is the first I’ve heard of this. If you download the release candidate you’ll see that, sure enough, the Motion template set and the Action Streams plugin are gone. One has to wonder if this is the end of Motion or if it will be back as a separate plugin. If anybody’s heard more about this, let us know in the comments.

Over at the Melody Project, they’re making progess toward an initial release. To give people a sneak peak, they released a list of planned 1.0 features. Some of the more interesting ones include revision histories, a full-screen editor, and a smaller core. It’s good to see this project gaining momentum.

We’ve got one new plugin to talk about this week. Byrne Reese has developed a plugin that “provides integration with Stumple Upon’s URL shortening service and iframe viewing window.” On top of that, it makes it easy for you to host your own shortened URLs.

One of the scariest jobs you’re likely to have to do with your MT site is move it to another server. There are lots of ways to do it, each with its own advantages. Larry Sampas documented his latest server move. He did it using rsync, which is a great way to move the files between servers without downloading to a local machine.

Finally, Beau Smith has a tutorial on adding edit links to entries and pages. This method checks the user’s cookies to see if they’re logged in before displaying the links.

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

Now, for this week’s new plugins:

ooVoo Web Video Chat Room — The ooVoo service lets you video chat with up to six people at a time. This plugin makes it easy to embed an ooVoo chat room into any page of your site. It includes some basic settings for controlling the size and look of the chat.

Gravatar for Movable Type — Most people are familiar with the universal avatar service Gravatar — we use it here, in fact. This plugin, from Makoto Kawasaki, adds Gravatars to the comments on your blog.

Movable Type Farsi — This one is for the Farsi-speaking bloggers. Created by Pouya Salimi, the plugin expands MT’s support for right-to-left writing. It also adds a Farsi Calendar, Farsi tags, and a Farsi version of the Professional Pack Template Set.

That’s it for this week. Got some MT news for us? Let us know in the comments.

• New Pico theme.
• Fixes for FastCGI bugs.
• Lots of improvements for backup and restore.
• A ton of bug fixes.

According to the schedule, there should be one more release candidate in mid-November, then a final release of 5.0 during the first week of December.

Besides the app itself, a lot of work is being done on the MT5 documentation. Beau Smith announced that the doc index and a page of recent updates is now available. Here’s hoping they have time to release a lot more documentation before MT5 ships.

The Melody Project has also made progress recently. In particular, Byrne Reese posted a major refectoring of the blog settings. Byrne moved all the settings to the same screen to improve performance and usability. I’m eager to see what other UI improvements the team makes.

Finally, the folks over at Endevver Consulting have written a tutorial on creating an event calendar with MT. The setup looks to be far better than the one I hacked together back in the MT3 days.

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

First, Mike T. from Code Monkey Ramblings has a new MT theme: Dark Marble. Based on a WordPress theme by the same name, Mike says he should have a version that supports the professional website templates soon.

Mike also has two new plugins. Comment Flag lets users report comments to you via email. The plugin uses jQuery so that the interaction is seamless for the user.

Mike’s other new plugin is Executable File Filter. It checks whether uploaded files are executable binaries or PHP scripts and renames them so they can’t be run.

Besides plugins, we also have a few tutorials to share. Beau Smith wrote a post on how to create an advanced breadcrumb navigation. Beau uses the function argument of the var tag to add and remove breadcrumb locations in an array. I have to admit, I was unfamiliar with this functionality. It’s features like this that bring MT close to being its own programming language.

For those of you that blog from your mobile phones, Jenifer Hanen explains how to change the directory where photos are uploaded. Apparently, the Atom Protocol service — which is often used by mobile client applications — in MT can only handle uploading to the main blog directory. Follow Jenifer’s instructions and you’ll be able to upload to any directory you like.

Finally, Jason Hunter has just released the code he uses to run MT under the Catalyst MVC framework. Jason explained how he did it several months ago, but just recently put the code on Github.

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

Last week I told you about the first release of SmartTrim, a plugin by François Nonnenmacher that is a replacement for the default text trimmer in MT. A few days later he released an update. This version changes the argument syntax to match that used in MT. It also auto-closes any HTML tags in your text.

François also wrote about moving from Drupal to MT. He includes a script that will generate a MT import file, along with tips on redirecting links. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone do this before, so it’s nice to have the process documented.

We also have a tip from “The Aardvark” on Adding TweetMeme to your MT blog. Not complicated at all, but good practice for anybody learning how to customize their templates.

Finally, Byrne Reese has been working on MT/Melody documentation for designers. Byrne has posted the documentation as a Github repository, so you can contribute to the project.

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

For those that didn’t know, Endevver Consulting is made up of two long-time MT developers: Jay Allen and Byrne Reese. Byrne has been busy this week. Besides AssetGallery, he also released CacheManager. This plugin helps you manage your template module cache, by allowing you to view what’s been cached and clear it out.

And we have one more from Byrne. AutoPrefs allows theme developers to include blog preferences in their themes. This allows themes to do powerful things, like set the default archive type or interact with other plugins via their preferences. This seems very useful for theme designers, since it allows them more control over the environment where their themes run. I wonder, though, how willing users will be to give themes that much control.

François Nonnenmacher has written SmartTrim, a text modifier that offers an alternative to the built-in trimming tools. It lets you set a character limit for the trimmed text, but it’s careful not to break in the middle of a word. You can also specify an ending string like an ellipsis.

Finally, Mark Carey shows us a test post that could eventually be a plugin for embedding Google Wave in MT entries. The idea is that a wave could be used for real-time discussions about an entry. Good to see somebody playing with this. Wave is an interesting technology, and I think there’s a lot of places — not just comments — where it could be useful in MT.

Speaking of Google Wave: I’d like to experiment with using Wave to gather news for this blog post each week. If you’re interested and you have a Wave account, email me and put “Movable Wave” in the subject line.

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

One thing that’s been getting a lot of attention is the upgrade of existing blogs to the new “website with blogs” structure. Some people are concerned that it will be too complicated for those that just want a blog. It’s a fair criticism, though I don’t see many people these days using MT as “just a blog.” Six Apart is paying attention, though, and has revised the process to try and strike a balance between features and simplicity. It will be interesting to see how they ultimately solve this issue.

Also this week, Byrne Reese announced that mod_perlite is available This is an Apache module designed to run Perl in much the same way that PHP runs on a web server. This would make MT and other Perl applications faster and less resource intensive. The developers now say they’ve got it running MT and hopefully someone will do some benchmarking soon so we can see the difference.

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

Clearly, this is the product of some kind of partnership between 6A and Zemanta. Since the plugin is open source, 6A can include it in MTOS with no licensing issues. Still, some users have complained. Since it’s tied to a commercial service it smells non-free, even though the plugin is GPL and it functions for free. There are those that feel this plugin should have been limited to the commercial verson of MT, rather than included in MTOS. So far, 6A shows no signs of changing things based on these complaints.

Six Apart had another major announcement this week: The launch of the TypePad Platform. This doesn’t have anything to do with MT, but it seems significant enough to mention. 6A is turning TypePad into a cloud platform for other developers to build services. As an example of how to use this new platform, they also released TypePad Motion, which is a microblogging app built with some of the code from Pownce — the microblogging service 6A bought, then shut down. It will be interesting to see what kind of applications get built on this new platform.

Now, let’s check out some new plugins:

ImageInfo 2 — This plugin, based on an older plugin by the same name, lets you extract and display the EXIF data from digital photos. Author Madjack has full documentation in both Russian and English on his website.

SearchEkko — You’ve probably seen blogs that do this: When you visit them from a search engine, the page knows where you came from and what you searched for. SearchEkko — written by Noah Austen Ready-Campbell — does this, and shows the user other entries related to their search.

AddThis — AddThis makes it easy for your visitors to submit your post to sites like Digg, Reddit, Twitter, and more. And this plugin makes it easy to add AddThis to your site.

Full Screen Mode — I don’t know about you, but I find the template edit forms in MT awfully cramped. Byrne Reese must feel that way as well, because he’s written a plugin that lets you expand those text boxes to full screen. Thanks, Byrne!

We also have a couple of new tips this week. First, Toronto Mike shows us how to style author comments. As Mike shows, MT makes this really easy — though you’d be surprised how many people don’t know author’s can comment from the MT admin.

And finally, Serdar Yegulalp provides a tutorial on doing “library-style” alphabetization of your posts. This means it will ignore articles such as “A” and “The” and sort based on the first “important” word of the title. This is a great way to organize book and movie reviews.

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

First off, there’s a new MT5 beta. Lots of improvements and bug fixes over the previous beta. But, if you haven’t installed it yet, you might just want to wait: I’ve heard that beta 3 is supposed to be released in the next day or two.

Next, Byrne Reese has a new plugin that implements OpenSSO. This allows you to use an OpenSSO server as a single sign-on solution for your MT installation. For more on OpenSSO, see the documentation from Sun.

Need help installing MT?, Sahas Katta has created a video to walk you through the process. His process includes a shell script that does most of the work for you. Thanks, Sahas!

Finally, Tom McGee wrote a post with several tips for customizing MT blogs. Tom’s tips focus on creating custom themes and modifying banner images in default themes. Good information for those less familiar with MT’s current theme system.

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

* Websites — MT 5 will have the concept of a website, which includes blogs and pages. This makes it more of a CMS, and makes it much simpler to use MT to maintain your entire site.

* Revision History — Entries, pages, and templates will all maintain a revision history. I’m particularly excited about this feature. The ability to modify templates, and return to previous version, is very useful.

* Custom Fields — Custom fields are now available on more objects and can be imported and exported. Plus, you can map them to a category/folder, so that they only appear if an entry/page is within that category/folder.

* Themes — MT 5 will have a whole new theme engine, which allows the bundling of templates, CSS, images, etc. together as a complete website theme.

…and lots more. MT5 will be a huge change from previous versions, pushing the platform more towards a CMS and further away from being a personal blog engine. We should get more details about these other changes in the coming months.

Also this week, Byrne Reese released a new beta of his Media Manager plugin. This release fixes problems caused by Amazon changing their API.

And finally, Bill Hartzer wrote a piece about search engine optimization for blogs. Bill covers some general guidelines, along with some specifics about MT. There’s some good information here, with links to other resources. Note: As noted in the comments, this is apparently an old article. My apologies for not reviewing it more closely.

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

Also this week, Okayama has created a new Google Analytics plugin. This one pulls your data into your blog stats in your dashboard. This sounds very convenient for doing a quick check of your Google Analytics data.

Our last plugin for this week comes from, Byrne Reese. Have you ever wanted to analyze the data MT gathers about your users? Or generate a list of users you could use for a mailing? User Export can do those things. It will export all the data about selected users, including their custom data.

Finally, Beau Smith wrote a tutorial that shows how to use configuration directives — including ones you create yourself — to determine whether comments in your templates get written. This is a clever approach, and I can see it being useful for a variety of task.

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

We’ve also got a handful of plugins this week. First, Byrne Reese has released the Template Profiler. This plugin will give you data on what’s happening when your index templates are published. Publishing speed is one of those ongoing issues with MT. This tool can help you find bottlenecks in your templates that need to be optimized.

From Dan Wolfgang we have a new Action Streams plugin. This one, Action Stream: Delicious Tag, allows you to pull Delicious links with a specific tag into your Action Stream.

Finally, Tatsuhiko Miyagawa has a new plugin that pings PubSubHubbub Hubs when you update your content. If you haven’t heard about PubSubHubbub, it’s a protocol from Google that’s designed to push updates out to clients, rather than require them to regularly check for new content. It’s pretty new, but it’s attracting a lot of attention as possibly a better way to distribute posts.

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

In plugin news, Byrne Reese has announced Image Cropper — a new plugin that lets you crop and resize images to make more interesting thumbnails. Be sure to watch the screencast to see how it works — the interface looks very nice.

Finally, Dan Wolfgang has an updated version of his More Custom Fields plugin. This version adds a “Selected Entries” custom field, which can be used for things like custom related entries lists.

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

• Performance for all publishing is faster than ever.
• Your readers can now find content by author or date range (something Google’s site search doesn’t do) with the powerful new search feature.
• You can create a new site based on an existing one in just a few clicks with smarter blog cloning.
• Page views can increase by more than 50% with the new flexible pagination for comments and entries (based on the testing of one of our clients.)
• It’s faster to insert and re-use photos in your posts, and simple to create slide shows, with the most powerful asset manager ever.
• Documentation is more comprehensive and easy to access than ever before.

Some impressive claims there. I hope after people have had time to kick the tires they’ll let us know how it really performs.

Also, Matt Jacobs has continued his series about the new features in 4.3. In his latest installment, he talks about blog cloning. The ability to clone a blog while omitting the content will be very useful to web site developers. Media companies, for example, tend to have many blogs, all with the same basic design. This make the creation of new blogs much easier.

Finally, Mike from Code Monkey Ramblings has instructions for putting AddToAny buttons on your posts. AddToAny provides widgets that make it easy for your visitors to submit your posts to a variety of social networks. Thanks, Mike!

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

Over at MovableType.org, Matt Jacobs has been writing about some of the new features in 4.3. First, he has an explanation of the new entry asset manager. From a usability standpoint, this is a huge improvement over the previous system. And Matt shows how the new system can be used to generate slideshows for the images on each entry.

Matt also has a post about entry pagination in 4.3. With the new pagination system, your first page can be static, while additional pages use MT-Search to generate the results. One of the side effects of this is MT-Search now has some new options, such as searching by author or date.

Also on the MovableType.org blog, Beau Smith talks about Six Apart’s efforts to improve documentation. I would say better documentation is the number one request coming from the MT community. Reading the post, it’s clear Beau has his work cut out for him. He’s asking for help writing/reviewing the current docs, so if you have some extra time please jump in and lend a hand. If you need an incentive, how about this: Once the language documentation is done, Beau can move on to creating guides and tutorials for using MT. That’s something I would definitely like to see more of.

Finally, Mike from Code Monkey Ramblings has written a couple of tutorials. First, he has some code you can use to create month-by-year archives. In other words, it’s a yearly archive with each year’s archives broken down by month. This can be a much easier way to browse archives.

Also, Mike wrote a guide to using jQuery for comment previews. There seems to be a general movement toward the use of jQuery in the MT community. I’m a big fan of jQuery personally, and I think this could lead to some interesting new features in MT themes.

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

• Entry Pagination via MT-Search
• Clone a Blog’s Structure Without the Content
• Comment Pagination
• Per Entry Asset Management

Plus lots of bug fixes. The new asset management is what interests me the most — it means the end of the awful form tags currently used to associate an image with an entry. If you’re the beta type, download and try it today.

Six Apart also announced plans for MT 5. Though very little info has been released at this point, a Google translation of a 6A Japan page hints at things like theme sharing and version control.

Now for some plugin updates. First, Mark Carey released an update for the Twitter Commenters plugin. This updates fixes an OAuth bug.

Also, Rob Kenny has a beta of a new version of his HashTag plugin. The beta version adds support for scheduled posts.

We also have a couple of tutorials this week. Beau Smith wrote a post about adding custom styles to an individual entry. Beau uses a rather clever combination of MT template tags and PHP to call a custom CSS file for a particular entry. This is especially handy for adding styles during holidays.

Finally, Horst Prillinger describes how to add Dublin Core metadata to blog entries. For those looking to make their blog as semantic as possible, this is very useful.

What have you done with MT this week? Let us know in the comments.

It’s unclear at this point how this project will differ from the existing open source version of MT. Certainly, a different leadership is going to have different priorities. The Melody folks seem to be bending over backward to show this is not a break from MT, but just a separate development branch. And, similarly, Six Apart has welcomed the new project. So I doubt we’ll see any of the commercial MT features rewritten as open source modules, at least in the near term. It’s more likely we’ll see features that are useful to independent developers (and, consequently, small to medium size businesses) instead of the enterprise-level development that seems to be 6A’s focus.

Byrne Reese, a long-time MT developer and one of the founders of Melody, was kind enough to respond in the comments and set me straight:

Don’t be so sure. For Melody to be successful, it still has to compete, even in some respects against Movable Type. That being said, any feature in Melody requires someone committed enough to develop it.

One priority for me personally is profiles – that is a feature I believe strongly should be core. If Melody is going to be a “progressive” let alone modern blogging and publishing app then profiles is essential. Others have mentioned implementing custom fields.

My hope though is that Six Apart will see the value in us collaborating on a shared code base. Those decisions however are not made quickly or easily – and they must be made with shared interests in mind.

So time will tell certainly, but do expect Melody to be a serious and compelling alternative to Movable Type. Melody is not a hobby for those committed to its success – it is a serious product looking to compete.

To me, this says more about the project then the original announcement did. Specifically, that Melody is not just a separage development track of MT, but a separate — and potentially competing — open source project.

If you’re interested in the direction Melody takes, I recommend reading their blog post on proposing changes. It outlines how best to submit your ideas for Melody.

What have you done with MT (or Melody) lately? Let us know in the comments.

It’s unclear at this point how this project will differ from the existing open source version of MT. Certainly, a different leadership is going to have different priorities. The Melody folks seem to be bending over backward to show this is not a break from MT, but just a separate development branch. And, similarly, Six Apart has welcomed the new project. So I doubt we’ll see any of the commercial MT features rewritten as open source modules, at least in the near term. It’s more likely we’ll see features that are useful to independent developers (and, consequently, small to medium size businesses) instead of the enterprise-level development that seems to be 6A’s focus.

A couple of other items this week. First, Mike T. explains how to install MT over SSH. This is my preferred way to do an install/upgrade, since it eliminates a lot of the permissions issues you can run into with FTP.

Finally, Beau Smith shows us how to add edit links to entries and pages. Combined with a bit of PHP to check for a cookie, this would be an easy way for logged in users to quickly edit posts.

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

Finally, Dan Wolfgang released a new plugin for Action Streams. Dan’s Delicious Tags plugin lets you pull any Delicious tag results into your Action Stream. It’s particularly handy if you’re tracking search terms related to your industry.

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

However, you may choose to hold off on this upgrade. People on the MT mailing lists noticed that it did not seem to be performing a full upgrade. Turns out the schema version was not updated, so the intended changes to the database are not made. Six Apart has assured everyone that has already upgraded that the problem will not cause anything to break. The schema changes were only to increase performance, so they are not required for the code changes. A fix is expected this week.

Still, this has led some in the MT community to call for 6A to do beta releases of minor updates like this, so these problems can be found before they’re put in production. Certainly, this would make sense, and there are plenty of developers willing to take new versions for a spin and report bugs. It makes even more sense on a release like this, when there wasn’t security-related bugs that needed to be sent out quickly. Hopefully 6A will consider this option for future versions.

I thought I’d take some time this week to mention a couple of new sites built with MT. First, MovableType.com has a story about The San Francisco Appeal, an online newspaper dedicated to local SF news. Somewhat similar, ChicagoNow is a collection of blogs providing news and information about Chicago neighborhoods. Owned by Tribune Media and developed by Byrne Reese, ChicagoNow is a community site for all of Chicago. Soon, they will be rolling out Motion-based functionality.

Speaking of Byrne Reese, he had two releases this week. First, the 1.0 version of Configuration Assistant. This plugin helps designers and developers create settings pages for their plugins and themes.

Also, Byrne officially released the Hybrid News theme. This version includes support for Config Assistant.

Byrne also wanted me to pass along the following:

I am embarking on a personal mission to help improve the theme landscape and market for Movable Type. My first aim is to focus on porting popular open source themes from other platforms to MT. In the process I am working to improve this process for others by creating tools like Config Assistant. I call upon the community to help by a) helping me directly by porting themes, and/or b) make it known what themes from WP/Drupal they really like so others can know what to port.

Have some ideas for Byrne? Contact him.

Finally, Mark Kolich has a tutorial on adding a feedback form to your blog. I think it’s rather clever the way Mark sends the user’s response to the Apache logs, bypassing the need for an additional script on the server.

What have you created with MT lately? Let us know in the comments.