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Movable Type Monday: YUI Rich Text Editor, PlasticField and Photo Editing Plugins

Movable Type Monday: YUI Rich Text Editor, PlasticField and Photo Editing Plugins

The past week was, once again, an activity filled week for the MTOS community with a large number of plugins being released including a new rich text editor, a new custom field plugin as well as a photo editing plugin!

Welcome to Movable Type Monday!

MTOS Community Updates

YUI Rich Text Editor: Movable Type 4.0 introduced a powerful new rich text editor and 4.1 took it a step further by allowing the editor to be easily replaced by another one. We’ve already seen the community embrace this feature with the popular FCKEditor plugin and this week, Richard Benson released another editor alternative with his YUI Rich Text Editor plugin which brings Yahoo’s Rich Text Editor to MTOS. The YUI editor is quite an advanced and extensible editor so I’m excited to see it being brought to MTOS and the opportunities it now enables! Great work Richard!

PlasticField: Jesse Gardner is a name that should be familiar to many Movable Type users as the talent behind the looks of movabletype.org, Learning Movable Type and one of the co-founders of The Style Contest. Last week, he released his first plugin dubbed PlasticField, a plugin that makes use of the new built in extensible custom fields functionality in the Movable Type Commercial Pack. PlasticField introduces a new formatted multi-line text field field – a textbox with the old-school formatting buttons. Definitely scratches an itch that many CustomFields users have had!

Zemanta: A new plugin by Bostjan Spetic brings the Zemanta experience to the MTOS by drawing in interesting content from around the web and presenting it on the new entry composition screen for inspiration!

True Type Fonts: SpagDesign launched a great new plugin dubbed TTFpj and allows you to display headings in rich typography. A definitely welcome alternative to sIFR and other similar techniques out there!

Curvaceous: Wrapping text around images is one of the great pains for beginners to blogging with MTOS which is why I’m happy that Ole Wolf has released a plugin to make it an automatic process! The screenshot illustrates what the plugin is capable of!

Joomsayer: Another plugin by Ole Wolf allows you to easily display quotations in a quote box. Handy! I’ve always wanted something similar for my personal blog but could never quite figure out the CSS behind it!

Pixenate Photo Editor: Perhaps one of the most fascinating and innovative new plugins out there today, Pixenate Photo Editor allows you to edit images that you have uploaded through MTOS’ asset manager – including rotating, cropping and changing brightness/contrast values – all from the comfort of Movable Type. I’m really wowed by this plugin as I’ve often wanted to make minor adjustments to an image once it’s been uploaded (and find the process of adjusting it on my desktop and then re-uploading too arduous!). Although it takes a little bit of hacking (hopefully something that Walter can overcome with subsequent releases) I think this plugin has the makings of a must-install plugin! Fantastic work Walter!

Movable Type 4.2 to focus on Speed: InformationWeek’s Peter Hagopian posted a short review of Movable Type 4.2, concluding:

That’s compelling news on the speed and performance front.

See Also
Apple Silicon Processor

It’s good to see that Movable Type is becoming the subject of more balanced reviews!

Obama for MTOS: Or rather, MTOS for Obama! As part of ZDNet’s coverage of how Web 2.0 has been helping the presidential candidates, Larry Dignan took a look at the technology powering Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. As Larry reports:

Obama kept his IT strategy simple. The campaign didn’t customize heavily and it didn’t look for bleeding edge technology. It used the same stuff the rest of the blogging world does–Movable Type, PHP, MySQL with a dose of community. The competitive advantage came from using social networking to “empower a highly decentralized, largely self-organizing, network of volunteers,” reports Carr.

Official Usage Survey: Possibly in preparation for the imminent release of Movable Type 4.2, Six Apart posted a survey in order to solicit information from MTOS users about how installations of Movable Type have been configured. Byrne Reese describes the survey as simple, multiple-choice and anonymous and will be used to better understand user needs to build a product more optimized for common usage scenarios. I encourage all Movable Type readers reading to fill out the survey when you have a free moment!

iPhone Application: Although not technically related to Movable Type, Six Apart’s Michael Sippey demoed a native TypePad application for the iPhone. Hopefully we will see something similar for Movable Type soon! In the meanwhile, however, the iMT plugin (also by Six Apart) has been available for quite some time and provides a very robust way of blogging on MTOS with an iPhone!

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