Movable Type Monday: Updates on MT5

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Happy Monday, folks! This week, Six Apart posted a couple of blog entries updating us on the status of Movable Type 5. First thing to note is that the North American and European release will not be tomorrow. Instead, MT5 will be released on December 16. The reason given is they need more time to work on developer documentation. Since a lack of documentation has been an issue in the past, this is probably a good move.

Also for MT5, 6A’s Beau Smith wrote up a new installation and upgrade guide. This set of instructions covers a lot of different scenarios, with additional reference material so you understand what is going on. This is probably the most extensive installation documentation for MT I’ve ever seen. Good work, Beau. [Read more…]

Movable Type Monday: MT5 Release Candidate, Event Calendars, Melody Update, and More

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Happy Monday, folks! Well, after several rounds of beta testing, the first release candidate of Movable Type 5 is here. Lots of changes since the last beta, including:

  • New Pico theme.
  • Fixes for FastCGI bugs.
  • Lots of improvements for backup and restore.
  • A ton of bug fixes.

According to the schedule, there should be one more release candidate in mid-November, then a final release of 5.0 during the first week of December.

Besides the app itself, a lot of work is being done on the MT5 documentation. Beau Smith announced that the doc index and a page of recent updates is now available. Here’s hoping they have time to release a lot more documentation before MT5 ships. [Read more…]

Movable Type Monday: MT 5 Beta 4, SmartTrim, TweetMeme, and More

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Happy Monday, folks! This week, Six Apart released what should be the final beta of Movable Type 5. Beta 4 is, for the most part, a bug-fix release. The one big new thing is the “Professional Website Theme” that is now included.

Last week I told you about the first release of SmartTrim, a plugin by François Nonnenmacher that is a replacement for the default text trimmer in MT. A few days later he released an update. This version changes the argument syntax to match that used in MT. It also auto-closes any HTML tags in your text.

François also wrote about moving from Drupal to MT. He includes a script that will generate a MT import file, along with tips on redirecting links. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone do this before, so it’s nice to have the process documented.

We also have a tip from “The Aardvark” on Adding TweetMeme to your MT blog. Not complicated at all, but good practice for anybody learning how to customize their templates.

Finally, Byrne Reese has been working on MT/Melody documentation for designers. Byrne has posted the documentation as a Github repository, so you can contribute to the project.

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

Movable Type Monday: 4.3 Features, Documentation, jQuery, and More

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Happy Monday, folks! The Movable Type 4.3 beta continues with the third beta release this past week. Lots of bug fixes in this version. The final release is expected some time next week.

Over at MovableType.org, Matt Jacobs has been writing about some of the new features in 4.3. First, he has an explanation of the new entry asset manager. From a usability standpoint, this is a huge improvement over the previous system. And Matt shows how the new system can be used to generate slideshows for the images on each entry.

Matt also has a post about entry pagination in 4.3. With the new pagination system, your first page can be static, while additional pages use MT-Search to generate the results. One of the side effects of this is MT-Search now has some new options, such as searching by author or date. [Read more…]

Movable Type Monday: 4.26, Themes, Feedback Forms, and More

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Happy Monday, folks! The big news from the past week is the release of Movable Type 4.26. This is a performance release — it improves search performance and reliability of the job queue. It also includes a handful of other bug fixes, and some new configuration directives that help you tweak performance.

However, you may choose to hold off on this upgrade. People on the MT mailing lists noticed that it did not seem to be performing a full upgrade. Turns out the schema version was not updated, so the intended changes to the database are not made. Six Apart has assured everyone that has already upgraded that the problem will not cause anything to break. The schema changes were only to increase performance, so they are not required for the code changes. A fix is expected this week. [Read more…]

Movable Type Monday: Comment Authors, Stock Quotes, Github, and More

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Happy Monday, folks! We have some new Movable Type plugins to tell you about, plus some documentation to help you operate your MT blog better.

Comment Author Context — This plugin, from Six Apart employee Brad Choate, allows you to use the various author-related template tags to output information about a commenter. This can be especially useful if you’re wanting to use custom fields in your comment section.

Stock Quotes — Are you a business blogger? If so, this plugin might be for you. Based on the content of your post, it suggests stock quotes you might want to include. The ticker symbols will link back to Wikinvest, makers of the plugin.

Github Action Streams — In case you don’t know, Github is a source code repository provider. With this plugin, created by Brendan O’Connor, you can add your actions on Github to your Action Stream.

Finally, Byrne Reese has added another chapter to the Movable Type Open Source Operations Manual. This chapter covers the MT Publish Queue, and how to use it to reduce redundant publishing, offload publishing jobs to another server, and speed up commenting. Lots of good information here.

What have you done with Movable Type this week? Let us know in the comments.

Movable Type Monday: Operations Manual, Plugin Updates, Desktop Blog Software, and More

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Happy Monday, folks! I hope you enjoyed last week’s interview with Byrne Reese. Byrne is back this week with the creation of an open source operations manual. The goal of the project is to create a set of best practices for installing, running, and maintaining Movable Type. Byrne is looking for collaborators, so if you have experience managing MT, consider getting involved.

Plugins

Stop Design Photo Gallery — More from Byrne Reese. This is the set of original templates from the Photo Gallery plugin. As mentioned previously, it’s been spun off into its own plugin for those that want to keep that design rather than the new Mid-Century templates. [Read more…]

Movable Type Monday: White Space, Logging, and Documentation

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Happy Monday, folks! I don’t know about you, but I sure was glad to see the U.S. elections finally come to an end. Of course, considering the past election season lasted almost 2 years, it may have finished just in time for the mid-term election season to begin!

I bring this up in order to share a bit of MT Presidential trivia: Both current President Bush (in 2004) and President-Elect Obama (in 2008) used Movable Type for their campaign blogs. Perhaps that will give them something to chat about as they are preparing for the transition of power.

Alright, enough politics, let’s get down to business.

This week, Brad Choate posted a proposal for trimming white space in templates. I love this idea, and hope it gets implemented soon. When you’re writing complex templates, it’s easy to have long blocks where all you’re doing is setting the values of MT variables. When your page gets published, you end up with lots of empty space. As an occasional Ruby on Rails programmer, I like the proposed implementation — the syntax is similar to that used in ERB templates. [Read more…]

Movable Type Monday: Image Gallery, REST API, Pagination

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Happy Monday, folks! I get the sense the Movable Type community is in full-on development mode right now. In the past week I’ve seen new developer documentation, proposals for MTOS, and work on a REST API. Not much has been released, though, so I think people still have their heads buried deep into code. We’ll have to wait a bit longer to see what everyone’s working, but for now there are a few interesting new things to discuss.

Image Gallery

Mike T. has a new Image Gallery plugin that allows you to add an image gallery to a blog post. Mike’s examples on his site look great, and the ability to build a gallery on the fly when you write your post seems handy. [Read more…]