Happy Monday, folks! Lots of people are talking about Six Apart’s announcement at WordCamp Mid-Atlantic. The makers of Movable Type are reaching out to WordPress users by releasing two WP plugins. The first is Typepad Connect, which allows a blog to accept Google Connect, Facebook Connect, and many other authentication systems. The other is Typepad Antispam, Six Apart’s comment spam blocker, similar to Akismet.

It’s an interesting move by 6A. Some people are calling this a win for WP over MT, but I really don’t see that. Automattic sponsored the first Akismet plugin for MT, and that wasn’t considered a concession. Over the past few years, 6A has made it clear that while MT is one of their products, their overall business is blogging. It makes sense that they would try to extend their reach into other platforms. I have no idea if they’ll have any success with Typepad Connect on WP, but I’d wager Typepad Antispam will win them some converts. I’ve used both it and Akismet, and Typepad does a far better job of identifying spam for me. read more

Happy Monday, folks! I get the sense the Movable Type community is in full-on development mode right now. In the past week I’ve seen new developer documentation, proposals for MTOS, and work on a REST API. Not much has been released, though, so I think people still have their heads buried deep into code. We’ll have to wait a bit longer to see what everyone’s working, but for now there are a few interesting new things to discuss.

Image Gallery

Mike T. has a new Image Gallery plugin that allows you to add an image gallery to a blog post. Mike’s examples on his site look great, and the ability to build a gallery on the fly when you write your post seems handy. read more