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.