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

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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. [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: New MT5 Beta, Single Sign-On, Easy Install Video, and Theme Tips

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Happy Monday, folks! Movable Type Monday took a break for a couple of weeks, but now we’re back with the latest from the MT community.

First off, there’s a new MT5 beta. Lots of improvements and bug fixes over the previous beta. But, if you haven’t installed it yet, you might just want to wait: I’ve heard that beta 3 is supposed to be released in the next day or two.

Next, Byrne Reese has a new plugin that implements OpenSSO. This allows you to use an OpenSSO server as a single sign-on solution for your MT installation. For more on OpenSSO, see the documentation from Sun.

Need help installing MT?, Sahas Katta has created a video to walk you through the process. His process includes a shell script that does most of the work for you. Thanks, Sahas!

Finally, Tom McGee wrote a post with several tips for customizing MT blogs. Tom’s tips focus on creating custom themes and modifying banner images in default themes. Good information for those less familiar with MT’s current theme system.

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

Movable Type Monday: Version Announcement, Twitter Comments, Custom Styles, and More

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Happy Monday, folks! Sorry for the lack of updates last week — I was out of town and didn’t make it back in time for Movable Type Monday. Which was a shame, since we got a couple of pieces of really exciting news. First, the beta for MT 4.3 has begun. A few of the new features include:

  • Entry Pagination via MT-Search
  • Clone a Blog’s Structure Without the Content
  • Comment Pagination
  • Per Entry Asset Management

Plus lots of bug fixes. The new asset management is what interests me the most — it means the end of the awful form tags currently used to associate an image with an entry. If you’re the beta type, download and try it today. [Read more…]

Weblog Tools Collection WordPress Plugin Competition 3.0

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Weblog Tools Collection WordPress Plugin Competition logoThere is no doubt in the WordPress Community. The best Plugin competition has started: The Weblog Tools Collection WordPress Plugin Competition 2009 (3.0).

If you are new to the WordPress Community, you may not even know that you are probably using a WordPress Plugin generated during a past WTC WordPress Plugin Competition. There have been some incredible great and innovative – not to mention useful – WordPress Plugins such as: [Read more…]

Zemanta rolls out service to Safari and Chrome users

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Zemanta logoZemanta, which Jonathan picked up on last year in his five sources for free and legal images feature, has just announced that its technology is now available for both Safari and Chrome.

This means that users who’ve elected not to use Firefox or Internet Explorer can now have access to Zemanta’s content searching and sharing services. [Read more…]

Movable Type Monday: Food Blogs, Custom Fields, and Movable Type 4.24

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Happy Monday, folks! The big news this week is the release of Movable Type 4.24. Both a security and a feature release, this version is considered a mandatory upgrade. Here are a few details you should know, straight from the official announcement:

  • Release Type: Security Release. This update fixes a serious potential vulnerability which has not yet been exploited in the wild.
  • Mandatory? Yes, this is a mandatory security upgrade.
  • Performance Implications: None.
  • Plugins Affected: None. Your current plugins should continue to work as expected.
  • Templates Affected: None.
  • System Requirements: This release has no new or additional system requirements.
  • Licensing considerations: None. MT 4.24 is a free update for users of any version of MT 4.x.
  • Upgrade Fatigue: No further mandatory updates are planned for Movable Type 4.2.

[Read more…]

Movable Type Monday: Mobile Blogging, Plugins, System Architecture, and jQuery

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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…]

Sandbox for Movable Type plugin now available

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Movable Type has announced that its Sandbox for Movable Type plugin is now available, allowing the many Sandbox themes to be used on the MT blogging platform.

Beau Smith writes:

Ever thought about radically changing the look of your blog without much design work? Are you a designer who likes to work in semantic HTML and do amazing things with CSS? Maybe you’re moving from WordPress to Movable Type and want to keep your current design. Sandbox for Movable Type may just be what you’re looking for.

To install the plugin in Movable Type 4.2, it requires PHP set up on the server (pretty common) in order to generate dynamic CSS classes. The plugin is available to download now.

Six Apart launches TypePad AntiSpam open source comment spam solution

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Six Apart has announced that it’s making the technology behind TypePad’s blog comment spam system freely available to bloggers using Movable Type 3/4, WordPress 2.5, or “any other platform which supports spam plugins”. The system is already built in to TypePad.

The beta version of TypePad AntiSpam is now available to both personal and commercial users, regardless of how many comments their blogs receive. It’s a self-learning system, meaning that whenever a user reports a comment as spam, the system should learn from that, and improve its spam filters.

As a potential rival to Akismet, TypePad AntiSpam is also fully compatible with its API.

As for concerns that open sourcing the system will simply aid spammers wishing to circumvent the system, the FAQ explains: “We aren’t sharing all of the rules and logic that we run with our implementation of the TypePad AntiSpam engine. We are open sourcing the core engine, allowing others to build on top of our system allowing them to build and operate their own spam service.”

An enterprise-class service may be offered in the future, along with a customised service for users with specific requirements.

TypePad AntiSpam