Movable Type Monday: Poll Position, Photo Galleries and TinyMCE
The last couple of weeks has seen a ton of exciting features being developed by the community including a polling plugin, a new plugin and tutorial for creating photo galleries as well as an alternate wysiwyg editor. A short conference call with the MTOS community was also hosted last week with discussion around the development of Movable Type 4.2 – especially highlighting the large role the community has played!
Welcome to Movable Type Monday!
MTOS Community Updates
Poll Position: Late last week, prominent community member Dan Wolfgang of Eat Drink Sleep Movable Type and uiNNovations released Poll Position, a brand new plugin that allows you to easily add polls (and soon, surveys!) to your Movable Type blogs. The plugin seamlessly integrates with Movable Type’s interface, allowing you to create an unlimited number of polls and responses, styling them any which way and uses Google Charts to display the results beautifully. Poll Position is available in a free and licensed version, the latter (named “Poll Position: Champion” also offers a poll custom field type allowing you to simply add polls to entries!) A live demo of the plugin in action is also available. Fantastic work Dan!
Asset Gallery: A new plugin by yours truly creates a new custom field type that allows you to create collections of assets (or files) for entries. A great example of this is photo galleries for your entries which are displayed beautifully within the app using a CoverFlow-esque interface. Asset Gallery, however, isn’t limited to just images and supports non-photo uploads too including Word documents, PDFs and video files! A great example of Asset Gallery in action is on the Movable Type Plugin Directory itself, Asset Gallery powers the screenshot galleries you find on plugin profile pages.
Photo Galleries with jQuery and Assets: Billy Mabray wrote a great article on creating a slick photo gallery using Movable Type’s powerful built-in asset manager and jQuery – to give you beautiful slide-show like animation and interaction. It looks like a simple, elegant solution and Billy’s tutorial guides you, step-by-step, through the process! Check out the live demo for a preview of what a few lines of code can accomplish, great work Billy!
Getting Started with Movable Type: Movable Type was recently featured on the front page of the venerable Webmonkey with a guide to Get Started with Movable Type. The guide concisely explains the differences between the open source and commercial versions, how to install Movable Type and provides an introduction to Movable Type’s HTML-esque templating language. The guide also recommends some plugins to install, including the popular Action Streams
Identi.ca Update Stream: Last week John Eckman released a new action stream plugin that aggregates your content from the Identi.ca microblogging service
TinyMCE WYSIWYG Editor: One of the great things about Movable Type is its flexibility. For example, the entry editor can easily be replace through a plugin. A host of such plugins exist bringing the popular FCKEditor and YUI Rich Text Editor to Movable Type. Last week, alfasado added TinyMCE to the list of Movable Type compatible editors with his open source plugin.
MTOS Conference Call
Every other week, Six Apart hosts a conference call with the Movable Type community. Notes and a podcast recording of last weeks call are available. It was a shorter call than usual but discussion centered on community involvement with the official Movable Type development process and the community’s involvement with the latest release was highlighted – a prodigious list given the open source project is only six months old!
International members of the Movable Type community are also brainstorming ways they can participate in the conference calls too which currently is based in the United States due to the conference call provider. If you’d like to dial in for the next call (scheduled for the 23rd), the dial-in information follows, everyone is welcome!
* 1-712-432-3000
* Bridge Number: 353177