I can imagine that it is easy for some to skip over a blog post announcing the availability of a beta thinking "oh, they just fixed some bugs." But to so with this most recent release of Movable Type would be a mistake. One of the things that makes Movable Type stand out as a product is an incredibly professional, yet agile development process that allows for constant innovation in additional to a steady improvement upon stability and quality, without putting our releases at risk.
So while Movable Type 4.1 Beta 2 contains a huge number of bug fixes as it should being a beta, the development team still found time to include a some significant new features and advancements to the platform as a whole. Most notably:
AtomPub Support - Atom is something Six Apart has been very involved in since it first emerged as potentially the first Internet standard for syndication over four years ago. We released one of the first implementations of the fledgling protocol over 4 years ago and we were also among the first to support the Atom syndication format when it emerged as an official standard across all of our products. And while Movable Type has long supported the Atom Publishing Protocol in MT4.1 Beta 2 we introduce support for the official AtomPub standard, making it easier and more reliable then ever to use third party posting clients with your Movable Type installation.
Redesigned Asset Listing and Editing Screens - Beau Smith took the lead on redesigning the asset listing screen to include thumbnails of the assets you have created in your system. In addition, he designed the Edit Asset screen which includes such valuable information as a list of posts/pages in which that asset it utilized, embed information for including that asset elsewhere on the web and additional meta data about the asset. Good work Beau!
Turing Complete Templating Language - The development team checked in the last of many enhancements to our templating language that dramatically improves upon what one can possibly publish using Movable Type. MT4.1 introduces additional looping constructs, additional variable types (like hashes and arrays) and control flow structures like If-ElseIf-Else).
Beta 2 will be the last beta until the new year, but we will continue to blog through out the holidays to make sure people can continue to get their Movable Type fix. But in case you manage to tear yourself away from the computer for an extended period and you don't check in again for a while, everyone at Six Apart would like to wish you a great holiday season and a wonderful New Year.
budgibson.myopenid.com on December 21, 2007, 5:53 p.m. Reply
Hey Byrne, congratulations and happy holidays to all the folks at 6A who put this together. I think 4.1 is looking good. I particularly like the “Turing complete” templating language. One of my most vivid memories of PhD days at CMU was the question as to whether a computational system was “Turing complete”, really just a fancy way of saying it’s a complete programming language.
Carlo on December 21, 2007, 9:13 p.m. Reply
I have to say the new additions for MT 4.1 are really great. The new asset management is my personal favorite. With MT 4.0 I had to use FTP quite a lot cuase I didn’t like the way MT handled assets but with the MT 4.1b2 I can see it’s likely I won’t need FTP and rely solely on MT to handle everything.. Now this is the kind of CMS I really needed. MT might not be considered a CMS but it sure is growing into one. Few things are missing to make MT a full-pledged CMS and the best of them all. Good up the work guys!
Byrne Reese on December 21, 2007, 10:02 p.m. Reply
@Carlo and @Bud - I am so glad you guys like the new features. We are psyched about them as well. The team has been doing spectacular work on the product, work that is proving what I think will play a pivotal role in the new direction and future of Movable Type. At its core it will always be a blogging platform I think, but from that core will rise a better way to manage content and identity online.
Plus if you like what you see in the beta, I can’t wait to start showing off what we have coming out of our labs!
demonsurfer on December 22, 2007, 8:16 p.m. Reply
Nice - like the entry screen layout better now, and userpics will be great when it’s up and running. BIG PLUS: much faster on Media Temple, which I am very happy about.
Still hoping you’ll provide some sort of solution for personal users wanting to continue using customfields.
Cheers, and Merry Christmas!
demonsurfer on December 22, 2007, 8:20 p.m. Reply
Oh - would be nice to have a solution re asset management - either multiple uploads (particularly for existing MT-powered weblogs upgrading to MT4.1), or perhaps if it could scan an existing directory for images etc and then let the user choose which to include as MT-assets, how to label them etc.. maybe not feasible though.
Carlo on December 23, 2007, 9:28 a.m. Reply
You know what I really want/need.. a global user login/registration. Something that can let me set it so that users register to all blogs at once (or just selected ones)
budgibson.myopenid.com on December 24, 2007, 11:54 a.m. Reply
@Byrne, I like the labs idea. What would be good there would be to have the super stable core to test experimental features against. That way, you know what’s broken :).
I second the idea of rethinking registration a bit. Often, you really want commenters to be registered for all blogs. Maybe the solution is what I’m doing now, just using openid for all blog commenting. It vastly simplifies things from my end.
I also concur with the asset management suggestion. I view that issue as having two components. First, what’s the back-end for managing assets and associating them with entries? Second, what’s the GUI? In my use case, I’d like to associate assets with entries but have the two be independent.
alff on February 7, 2008, 6:45 a.m. Reply
IMHO MT4.1 b2 is very stable version
shutterbuddy on February 15, 2008, 6:06 a.m. Reply
I have mt4.1 personal version and trying to use the userpics feature but my pic does not show up beside posts or comments….whats wrong?
Thanks for any help,
Lampioane Zburatoare on October 1, 2012, 7:13 a.m. Reply
I am using a lot of CMS platforms, will not mention them there, I have downloaded MT 4.1 and installed it, it is not really a CMS yet, but is very nice :), I see it is open source so this can grow fast, good luck with it and keep doing a good job.
John Lewis on October 24, 2012, 11:29 p.m. Reply
To say that Moveable Type is not a CMS yet are really strong words. I have experience with Wordpress and Joomla and I have to say that MT is on their level even a bit above them. It is also a bit more complicated than the other two which is a point in negative plan for MT. However the positives are more than the cons.