Let’s get the bad news out of the way: In an effort to reorganize and cut their expenses, Six Apart is laying off 8% of their employees. Hopefully, those affected will get back on their feet quickly. The thing to watch is whether this slows development of Movable Type and how it impacts community involvement and documentation efforts.

Speaking of our community, let’s see what folks have been up to this week:

Plugins

ToI Planning released several plugins last week. Their descriptions in the Plugins directory are lacking in details, but from ToI Planning’s website and trying the plugins myself, I think I’ve figured them out. read more

Happy Monday, folks! I don’t know about you, but I sure was glad to see the U.S. elections finally come to an end. Of course, considering the past election season lasted almost 2 years, it may have finished just in time for the mid-term election season to begin!

I bring this up in order to share a bit of MT Presidential trivia: Both current President Bush (in 2004) and President-Elect Obama (in 2008) used Movable Type for their campaign blogs. Perhaps that will give them something to chat about as they are preparing for the transition of power.

Alright, enough politics, let’s get down to business.

This week, Brad Choate posted a proposal for trimming white space in templates. I love this idea, and hope it gets implemented soon. When you’re writing complex templates, it’s easy to have long blocks where all you’re doing is setting the values of MT variables. When your page gets published, you end up with lots of empty space. As an occasional Ruby on Rails programmer, I like the proposed implementation — the syntax is similar to that used in ERB templates. read more

Happy Monday, folks! I have to say, in the short time I’ve been doing these updates, I’ve received a great response from the Movable Type community. If there’s any way I can make MT Monday more useful for you, or if you know of a blog or website I should feature here, please let me know.

Now, on with the news!

Plugins

WebPurify & Mouthwash — Commenters must be getting particurly vulgar lately, since two profanity filters were released this week. WebPurify uses an online service for its filter, while Mouthwash — written by Dan Wolfgang — leaves it up to you to build your own list of bad words. read more

Happy Monday, folks! We told you last time about this being Movable Type’s 7^th birthday. The celebration concludes this week with a huge party at MT HQ. If you’re going to be in San Francisco, don’t miss it.

But before the party starts, we’ve got work to do. On with the MT news!

Plugins

Minifier — Hirotaka Ogawa released Minifier, which adds block tags for minifying CSS and JavaScript. If your CSS and JS files are already templates in your blog, this shouldn’t take you more than two minutes to set up and should significantly reduce download time for those files. read more

Happy Monday, folks, and a happy 7^th birthday to Movable Type. Looking back through my old blog posts, it looks like I’ve been using MT for about 5.5 of those years. I remember that first installation well — I converted from my hand-rolled system to MT in the hallways of the Austin Convention Center during my first SXSW. There were some hiccups, but I was happy with the results and I’ve been using MT for various projects ever since.

While we wait for someone to bring us some birthday cake, let’s see what’s been going on in the Movable Type Community.

Plugins

MT-Notifier — Chad Everett released an update to MT-Notifier, a popular plugin which notifies users of new posts, new comments, and more. 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

Hello, folks! I’m Billy Mabray, and I’ll be providing this week’s Movable Type update. I hope no one minds, but I went back a bit farther then a week — there’s been some really interesting things going on in the community that I wanted to share.

On with the show!

Plugins

Linked Entry Custom Fields: This is a deceptively named plugin from Six Apart. Yes, it does extend Custom Fields with a type of field that links entries together. But more than that, it will migrate your data from the popular Right Fields plugin to the Custom Fields that’s built into MT. This is huge, because although there have been various tutorials published on how to migrate, there’s never been an official, recommended way before now. read more

Want to put either WordPress or Movable Type to good sue as a traditional CMS? There are two posts about this on Devlounge that you really should read:

• Things to Consider When Using Movable Type as a CMS by Billy Mabray
• Things To Consider When Using WordPress as a CMS by Thord Daniel Hedengren

Yes, the latter one is written by me, and a while back at that, but it is interesting in comparison with Billy’s more recent post.

Coollittlethings Studio has added its own software to the mix of blogging applications for the iPhone in the shape of Blog Press (iTunes Store link).

Unlike some other general blogging tools for the iPhone which have missed out one or more key blog platforms, the developers claim it works happily with all the major players — that’s Blogger, Windows Live Spaces, WordPress, Movable Type, and TypePad.

It supports photo uploading from a Picasa Web Album or Blog Press Public Album (both of which would need to be set up first, naturally). It’s not clear whether you can also grab photos from the iPhone’s albums, as you would with most other applications. read more

Movable Type has announced that its Sandbox for Movable Type plugin is now available, allowing the many Sandbox themes to be used on the MT blogging platform.

Beau Smith writes:

Ever thought about radically changing the look of your blog without much design work? Are you a designer who likes to work in semantic HTML and do amazing things with CSS? Maybe you’re moving from WordPress to Movable Type and want to keep your current design. Sandbox for Movable Type may just be what you’re looking for.

To install the plugin in Movable Type 4.2, it requires PHP set up on the server (pretty common) in order to generate dynamic CSS classes. The plugin is available to download now.