Movable Type 5

By Beau Smith
Posted January 5, 2010, in MT5.

Crack the champagne!

Movable Type 5 is ready for you to download and give it a roll.

Download

Movable Type 5.01 (available in English, Japanese, German, Spanish, Dutch and French.)

Movable Type 5.01 - commercial license
Movable Type Open Source 5.01 - open source license

This is a great milestone in the 8 years of Movable Type history.

Some long-awaited features are now available:

Websites for grouping blogs together.
Themes with full support for custom fields, static files, templates, categories, folders, etc for blogs and websites.
Revision History for entries, pages, and templates.
Custom Fields for all objects.
User Dashboard for quick access to the most used blogs and websites.

…and much more.

We’re excited that all of these features derived from real-world use cases requested by enthusiastic customers using Movable Type. A big thanks to the customers building beautiful things with Movable Type.

And huge thanks goes out to everyone on the Movable Type team to design, build and test this release.

In the coming weeks we’ll be posting articles and adding to the documentation to help you take advantage of the new features in Movable Type.

Documentation

We’ve got a lot of new docs that are being reviewed and will be published as they become available. We’ll do a regular wrap up of new post on this blog as well. Until then keep an eye on these pages:

MT5.x Development

The MT SVN trunk is where all future development of MT5 will occur.

MT5 Trunk SVN TRAC

MT 5.01 release (codename G2) SVN TRAC mt5.01 SVN Tag

Found a Bug?

To avoid duplication of efforts, search existing bugs (from the feedback page) before submitting a new bug.
Submit a bug in the Greyhound (MT5) Beta

Have a Question?

Ask questions about this release or Movable Type 5 in general in one of these places:

Movable Type 4.33 Security Update

Part of the reason for the delay of the 5.01 launch was that a minor security issue was reported that affected both MT4.x and MT5.x. This is an optional update. Read more in the release notes.

Download MTOS-4.33-en.zip or MT-4.33-en.zip. Packages for all languages.
Release Notes

MT4.x Development

As many customers will be on MT4 until they have a need to upgrade to MT5, Six Apart will continue to update the MT4.x product with security fixes and other updates as necessary. Any new updates to 4.x will be created from the following branches:

MT 4.33 (codename Carlson)
- SVN TRAC mt4.33 SVN Tag
MT 4.27 (Japanese only security release)
- SVN TRAC mt4.27 SVN Tag

Back

22 Comments

PRO IT Service on January 5, 2010, 4:08 p.m. Reply

Dear Beau,

That’s such excellent news for the entire community!

I’m so proud so see movable type turning into the v5.x series.

You may know that I’m working with movable type since v2.x (way back in 2002) and since then I’ve enjoyed coding movable type stuff, hacking the movable type application in order to adapt it to any publishing needs, as well as writing plugins for it.

I remain very grateful to that wonderful team from San Francisco which imagined and developed movable type. Special thanks to everybody from Six Apart, including my friend Brad Choate for his excellent engineering.

Kind Regards, Mihai Bocsaru

Beau Smith on January 5, 2010, 5:41 p.m. Reply

Mihai, we’re excited about the v5 series of MT too!

Just wanted to note that a majority of the engineering efforts are now headed up by the MT engineering team in the Six Apart Tokyo office. The designers, engineers, and QA team in Tokyo are top notch and very motivated to improve MT on a regular basis.

Brad Choate is still passionate about Movable Type and is always lends a helpful hand when he can, but currently most of his time is spent on Six Apart platform products.

Gautam Patel on January 6, 2010, 7:29 p.m. Reply

Sorry to rain on this parade of enthusiasm, but could someone please tell us common folk where to find the documentation for the new tags, attributes and modifiers for MT5?

Late last night I sidled into FogBugz, snooped around a search, slunk into a post, sneaked down the message body and scored some stuff that is essential but is also possibly illicit. Why else would it be hidden away like this?

My loot includes:

<MTMultiBlog mode=”context” include_blogs=”site” include_with_website=”0”>
include_with_website can be 0 or 1
mode can be context or loop

Also this:

<MTWebsites> is a container tag. It takes these attributes:
include_websites=”n” and exclude_websites=”n”, where n is the website id

Also this:

blog_ids=”all | children | siblings | ID”
include_blogs=”all | children | siblings | ID”

<MTWebsites> and the modifiers/attributes for <MTMultiblog> seem to me to be critical to the entire MT5 paradigm, one that is fundamentally different from its predecessor.

Here’s a specific example. MT5 new install; create WebsiteA with Blog1 and Blog2. Blog1 has 2 entries, Blog 2 has 5. On WebsiteA’s main page, you want to count the total number of entries in that website — obviously the aggregate of the entries in Blog1 and Blog2. How would you do that? Try any of the existing, documented template syntax. Doesn’t work. What does work is:

<mt:multiblog mode=”context” include_blogs=”site” include_with_website=”0”>
<blogentrycount>
</mt:multiblog>

Developing something that is such a huge conceptual shift, how difficult could it have been to grab a pencil and paper and make a note of this new stuff and just stick it onto the documentation page? What’s the point in keeping it hidden?

This is like giving us a brand new car — without an ignition key. Sure I can push it around with some effort, but I can’t really drive it, can I?

And before someone jumps down my throat, this stuff is NOT on the MT5 or any other docs page.