Movable Type Monday: Conference Call, Interviews and Proposals
When first compiling my list of links for this week’s Movable Type Monday, I thought last week was quite quiet. Turns out I was wrong with a significant refactoring to major code coming in beta 5 of Movable Type Open Source (MTOS) 4.15 as well as several interviews and announcements by members in the MTOS community.
Welcome to Movable Type Monday!
MTOS Community Updates
MTOS Conference Call: Every other week, Six Apart hosts a conference call with the MTOS community. This week’s call is available as a podcast for anyone who wasn’t able to tune in. Topics discussed included the upcoming MTDay and MTDay Proposals (the scope for which have been broadened to include designers, developers and enthusiasts, everyone welcome) as well as updates to the MT 4.15 beta and more information about the Apperceptive acquisition.
Tim Appnel at YAPC::NA: This week, Tim Appnel announced that he will be at Yet Another Perl Conference: North America where has has been invited to present two topics, one of which is MTOS for the Perl Developer. During this talk, he will cover:
- MT Over Time
- Architectural Makeup
- The MT4 Registry (YAML)
- Data Object Layer
- Templates
- Plugins API Overview
- MT & CPAN
- MTOS Roadmap, Current Activity & Getting Involved
More information on this talk is available from the YAPC::NA site.
Interview with Byrne Reese: Mike Moran has published an excellent interview with Byrne Reese, Product Manager of Movable Type at Six Apart, which started with him twittering about a problem he’d had with Movable Type. A really great read for more information on how Six Apart keeps their finger on the pulse. On a related note, Blogger Talks published an interview with me. Thord quizzes me on my views of the WordPress-Movable Type competition.
Defensio wants YOU: Carl Mercier, CEO of Defensio, a new antispam service, put out a call for MTOS plugin developers interested in creating a plugin for Movable Type that interfaces with Defensio. He highlighted that members from the MTOS community, in particular Brad Choate and Tim Appnel, had already begun this work by writing Net::Defensio and creating the initial plugin. A proposal page has already been created on the wiki with more information on the project.
Sticky Timezone Plugin: Patrick Benny (you may remember him from his NotifyReplyee plugin that I featured last week) previewed another plugin called Sticky Timezone with a request for feedback. Sticky Timezone sounds like a useful plugin for those that travel frequently. I’ll let Patrick explain what it does:
I’ve made a plugin that automatically sets your blog time zone when your computer’s clock time has been changed. This works whether you’re traveling with your own computer and adjusting the clock yourself, or using various computers around the world. If you want your blog posts to be in the time zone corresponding to where you currently are, no more need to go in MT’s preferences every time!
Proposals: Last week saw a large amount of activity around Proposals in the MTOS Wiki. The first proposal was for a JSON API, the objective of which was to modify MTOS to provide JSON APIs natively. As a plugin developer (and one who’s had to hack JSON into his plugins a lot), this definitely has me interested! The second was for a Configuration Assistant plugin that would allow plugin developers to easily design the settings pages of their plugins. Byrne Reese provides a basic prototype.
MTOS Beta Test Updates
Beta 5: Beta 5 is due shortly. Byrne Reese posted to MTOS-dev to explain that MTOS 4.15b5 was delayed in order to give it more time to be refined due to the large refactoring introduced with this release:
Revamped Commenting Workflow: MT4 introduced a brand new sign in screen that allowed users to sign in with an authentication service (OpenID-enabled) before posting a comment. Unfortunately, there was a major bug in how this worked when you would be logged into the Movable Type administration screen and attempted to post a comment (while remaining logged in). Turns out, this bug was extremely hard to fix but important enough that it warranted a major refactoring. This wiki page details the changes that will be the main focus of beta 5 which was elaborated on during the MTOS Conference Call.