September 21, 2007
Movable Type 4.01, scaling Movable Type, “Flat Templates” and other new plugins from our Hackathon
By Byrne Reese.
The release of our iPhone plugin for Movable Type is a tough act to follow. It has been very well received and has been the tipping point for many to switch to Movable Type from other platforms. But a lot has happened since we released iMT. For those of you not closely following our regular flow of betas, we released Movable Type 4.01 - a release we recommend all Movable Type users to upgrade to. It contains a number of key fixes, updates and a security enhancement. Most notably however is a fix that provides a remarkable boost to Movable Type’s performance and responsiveness. Users have reported seeing a dramatic decrease in the time it takes to publish their web sites as well as an increase in the responsiveness of the application. Of course Movable Type 4.01 also contained a number of key fixes to support the release of our first pack or “solution”: the Movable Type Enterprise Solution. I will refer those interested in that specific product to our corporate Movable Type website. However I would like to highlight several key resources that we created for our customers that operate at an enterprise scale, but that we think have…
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September 10, 2007
One more reason to buy an iPhone
By Byrne Reese and posted in Plugins.
For a long time now I have been one of those iPhone hold outs that insists on waiting for the next generation before taking the iPhone plunge. But today could be the tipping point for me and many other Movable Type users like me. Today we are happy to announce Movable Type for the iPhone and iPod Touch, made possible through a plugin developed by Brad Choate that makes use of the design developed by Walt Dickinson for TypePad. The plugin works by installing an alternate template set that is automatically used in place of the primary Movable Type user interface when the application is accessed via an iPhone or iPod Touch. The integration with Movable Type is totally seamless. Walt has done an amazing job creating a truly thoughtful user experience. He certainly had the option to just boil down the application to a smaller, more browsable version of itself. But he didn’t. Instead Walt designed the ideal user experience for iPhone from scratch. He created custom graphics, layouts and entirely new screens for the application in order to make this plugin feel like a completely native iPhone application. The plugin, and its design, is completely free and open…
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September 10, 2007
Movable Type 4.01 Release Candidate 1
By Byrne Reese and posted in News.
Last week we released Movable Type 4.01 Release Candidate 1. This release contains a number of fixes, but a couple in particular that we feel we should highlight for our users: A fix for an XSS vulnerability that affects blogs in which the primary Movable Type application is hosted on a different domain then their blog. The vulnerability results from a commenter name of an authenticated user that contains apostrophes. For users who host their blog and application on different domains, we ask that you please upgrade to 4.01 when it is released. A fix for a low-level bug that affects Movable Type’s data abstract layer called Data::ObjectDriver. In this bug, any page within the application or on the published blog that needs to compose links to the next and previous entries in a sequence of entries, will result in Movable Type querying and pulling from the database more entries then is technically necessary. This has an adverse affect on performance and memory utilization during publishing operations and page load operations. This bug has the largest impact on large blogs with thousands of entries. For users with blogs of this size we strongly recommend you upgrade. The rest of the…
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September 7, 2007
Podcast with Dan Wolfgang
By Byrne Reese and posted in Plugins.
In this week’s bi-week community conference call we decided to shake things up a bit and change the format of the call. So, in addition to briefing the community of Movable Type news, the product roadmap and other Six Apart developments, I spent the majority of the time interviewing and getting to know one of the callers and members of our community. The lucky winner? Dan Wolfgang, the creator of one of Movable Type’s most popular plugins: Better File Uploader, “BFU” as the community calls it. In our conversation we talk about how he got started using Movable Type, how he became a developer on the platform and the process he went through in building BFU. He also shared with me what’s next for the MT4 compatible version of MT4, something he plans to release in the coming weeks alongside the multitude of other plugins our developer community is creating. Dan was a great sport in allowing me to put him on the spot as I did; for which we should all be incredibly grateful….
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September 5, 2007
A Plethora of Plugins
By Anil Dash.
Movable Type 4.0’s only been out three weeks, and we’ve seen dozens of poweful new plugins for the platform, with new ones popping up every day. As someone who first installed Movable Type as a beta six years ago (!), I’ve never seen a time where more compelling or just plain fun plugins have been launched in such a short period of time.Because a lot of us have been busy uploading the new “Works With MT4” plugins to our blogs, it’s probably worth taking a look to see what all the plugin developers in our community have been up to. And of course, the vast majority of older plugins still work with MT4 as well — these are just some of the ones that show of MT4’s features the best. Check ‘em out:Never Get Dash-BoredGoogle AdSense Widget: David Raynes lets you keep an eye on the bottom line from your MT4 dashboard, showing your recent earnings information from Google’s AdSense service.Google Analytics Widget: One of the breakout additions for MT4, this popular plugin lets you see your daily traffic right on MT4’s dashboard, with David Raynes making smart use of the built-in charting functions in the platform.FeedBurner Widget: Just like…
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