Movable Type Monday: MT5 Delayed, Media Manager, Page Listing Hack, and More

Happy Monday, folks! Disappointing news for those of us waiting for the official Movable Type 5 release: It’s been postponed till January 5. In the announcement, Six Apart only says that there are issues to resolve so they’re waiting till after the holidays to release. I believe this is the third official release date we’ve had, let’s hope it’s the last one.

Byrne Reese has announced a new version of the Media Manager plugin. The previous version was broken by a change to Amazon’s API. Rather than patch the problem, Byrne did a major rewrite of the software to take advantage of an existing Amazon API library. As a result, folks upgrading from a previous version will likely need to update their templates.

Also this past week, Beau Smith published a tutorial on hacking MT to list pages by created date. This hack allows you to modify the MT admin so that the list of pages is sorted by their creation date. Why would you want to do this? As Beau explains, the “authored on” date is easily edited in batch mode, making it an easy way to create a custom sorted list of your pages.

Finally, the Melody Project is hosting an online designer training seminar. The seminar is December 16 at 10:00am PST, and will last about 45 minutes. From the announcement, topics covered will include:

Creating, packaging, and distributing themes.
The templating language.
Custom theme options.
Preferences bundles.
Differences between Melody and Movable Type.

You’ll also have the opportunity to provide feedback to the development team.

What have you done with MT lately? Let us know in the comments.

Billy Mabray

Billy Mabray is a web developer in the publishing industry. Over the years, he's written with and developed for just about every blogging platform there is. Blogging is in his blood, but the doctors think he can live a normal life anyway.