by Billy Mabray
Happy Monday, folks! Things seem to be a bit slow in the Movable Type community right now. I think it’s a combination of the holidays and impending release of MT5. Still, we’ve got a few news items to tell you about.
Mike from Code Monkey Ramblings has forked Byrne Reese’s jQuery Comment plugin. This doesn’t seem to be a radical departure from the original. Instead, Mike has concentrated on small tweaks that improve the plugin and extend its compatibility with existing themes. [Read more…]
by Billy Mabray
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…]
by Billy Mabray
Happy Monday, folks! Lots of people are talking about Six Apart’s announcement at WordCamp Mid-Atlantic. The makers of Movable Type are reaching out to WordPress users by releasing two WP plugins. The first is Typepad Connect, which allows a blog to accept Google Connect, Facebook Connect, and many other authentication systems. The other is Typepad Antispam, Six Apart’s comment spam blocker, similar to Akismet.
It’s an interesting move by 6A. Some people are calling this a win for WP over MT, but I really don’t see that. Automattic sponsored the first Akismet plugin for MT, and that wasn’t considered a concession. Over the past few years, 6A has made it clear that while MT is one of their products, their overall business is blogging. It makes sense that they would try to extend their reach into other platforms. I have no idea if they’ll have any success with Typepad Connect on WP, but I’d wager Typepad Antispam will win them some converts. I’ve used both it and Akismet, and Typepad does a far better job of identifying spam for me. [Read more…]
by Billy Mabray
Happy Monday, folks! If you’ve ever struggled to install Movable Type, you may have a new option soon: Six Apart has announced that MT will soon be available under the Parallels Application Packaging Standard. This will allow hosting companies to offer a simple install to their customers. If you have a Plesk control panel you’ll be able to install MT with the click of a button. MTers have always been envious of other open source projects that could be installed through things like APS. Hopefully this means we’ll see MT on other hosting platforms as well. [Read more…]
by Billy Mabray
Happy Monday, folks! First off, for any of you that are trying, or thinking about trying, Motion — the social networking app built on Movable Type — a new beta was released today. I have not tried it myself, nor have I found release notes for it. If you have tried it, let us know what’s new in the comments.
This week, Chad Everett released version 4.2.0 of MT-Notifier. This version includes some bug fixes and the ability to specify a base URL for a script. [Read more…]
by Billy Mabray
Happy Monday, folks! First off, I’m sorry there was no Movable Type Monday last week. Seemed like most of the community had taken off for the holidays, so I decided to hold what I had for an extra week. But now it’s a new year and there’s lots of new stuff to talk about.
Custom Header — Byrne Reese put out a new plugin for uploading and customizing the header image on your blog. Custom Header handles the whole process of uploading, cropping, and positioning your banner image. This will be great for personalizing template sets, and it modifying an existing template set to use this plugin looks very straightforward.
Share — This plugin lets you add an “email to a friend” form to your blog posts. Created by Dan Wolfgang, Share is customizable and works with MT’s junk filters. Thanks, Dan!
Besides his Share plugin, Dan also recently wrote instructions for using his Poll Position plugin with jQuery. Poll Position lets you add polls to your blog. I’m a huge jQuery fan, so I’m glad to see Dan write this up.
Beau Smith wrote improved installation instructions for the Action Streams plugin. Looking at Beau’s method, it seems odd Action Streams isn’t set up this way to begin with. Glad somebody explained the right way to do it.
Writer Susan McNerney posted instructions on changing your banner image. It’s clear that Susan was frustrated by how much trouble it was to change her banner. Sounds like she needed Byrne’s Custom Header plugin.
Over at TMCnet, Tom Keating out does himself, writing a tutorial that offers several things one can do with MT assets. He starts with listing recent image assets linked to entries, then creates a related entries widget that includes images, and finally shows how to add images to the FastSearch plugin. Thanks, Tom!
Finally, John Walker describes how to install Image::Magick on CentOS 5.2 for your Movable Type blog. His instructions may not be limited to MT, but since ImageMagick is one of the most difficult things I’ve had to install for any blog platform, I wanted to share his instructions.
What have you done with MT this week? Let us know in the comments.
