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Movable Type Tuesday: Custom Fields, Documentation, Virtual Servers

Movable Type Tuesday: Custom Fields, Documentation, Virtual Servers

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.

Sandbox: Originally a WordPress theme, Sandbox has been migrated to MT as a template set. This theme is designed to be customized, but looks good out of the box. Sandbox includes the latest version of StyleCatcher, which can be used to download custom Sandbox-compatible designs.

iPhone Template Set: Speaking of template sets, this plugin by Taichi Kaminogoya gives your blog that shiny, iPhone-site look.

WordPress Styles for Movable Type: Mike T. has created his own style repository for WordPress themes he’s converted to MT. The WordPress Styles for Movable Type plugin allows StyleCatcher to access that repository.

Forums Utilities: Movable Type Product Manager Byrne Reese released two plugins recently. The first is Forums Utilities, which provides additional functionality to forums created using the MT Community Solution. This includes promoting comments to entries, flagging comments as featured, and closing discussions.

Super Page: Byrne’s other plugin, Super Page, allows you to, “convert a single, massive page into a set of paginated, easy to navigate pages broken up by chapter/section.”

See Also
YouTube features for Content Creators

MT as a CMS

Ok, bit of self-promotion here. Over on Devlounge, I recently wrote about the ups and downs I’ve had using MT as a CMS. Hopefully some of the information was useful to people considering powering an entire site with MT. Be sure to check out the comments for other people’s experiences with MT.

Virtual Movable Type

Recently, Six Apart partnered with JumpBox to create Virtual Movable Type, a downloadable virtual server pre-built with MT. Virtual MT works with many popular virtualization software packages including VMWare, Parallels, and Xen. You can download it and have a complete server — with MT installed and ready to use — up and running in a few minutes. I tried it under Parallels and it worked great. This can be useful as a testing system, or for data centers that need to be able to create additional servers on demand.

Movable Type Europe Webinars

Finally, Tim Appnel let us know that Six Apart Europe will be hosting a series of webinars to help people learn how to make use of MT within their companies. Be sure to take advantage of that if you can.

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