July 29, 2009
MT 4.3: Faster Performance, Powerful Search, More Page Views
Posted in News.
Today marks the official release of Movable Type 4.3. While we’ve been previewing the features over the last week, below is a hit list of the biggest features. If you’re looking to download MT Pro, click here. Smarter Search and Pagination We’ve added several new ways to drill down your search (author, category and date), which lays the groundwork for the ability to paginate your index and archives. With a static first page and dynamic additional pages, your site gets the added page views with faster publish times. Additionally, we’ve added the ability to paginate comments, which will dramatically improve publish times on prolific comment threads. Entry Asset Manager MT’s smarter than ever with the way it handles assets like photos, which means it’s much easier to make slideshows and editing entries that use assets is even faster, with more control over your code. Read more » Summary Object Framework This is our first step in dramatically improving performance for our largest MT installations. This framework allows MT’s core codebase and plugins to store arbitrary summary information in the database, replacing expensive calculation queries with fast primary-key lookups against summary tables. The framework includes a flexible mechanism for invalidating summary…
Read More
July 28, 2009
Features of 4.3: Smarter Blog Cloning
Posted in News.
Up until the general release of MT 4.3, we are publishing details on the features of 4.3. Today we’ll focus on blog cloning. For quite some time, blog cloning has been built into Movable Type. It was created to help add a new blog without having to recreate templates, categories or anything else. The problem was that most often there was never the need to clone everything in a blog. Movable Type 4.3 has added some new features to the cloning process: Ability to omit specific content from the cloning process. The following content can be omitted: Entries/Pages Categories/Folders Comments Trackbacks It may seem like a minor addition, but it can save precious time while developing a site. Ability to specify critical blog settings for the new blog before cloning to prevent accidentally overwriting existing content. The following fields may be set before cloning: blog name path URL Several more checks (e.g., a confirmation page, better defaults) have been added to make this process rock solid. Personally, it has already made testing and setting up a few new installations much easier and faster. I hope this feature will scratch an itch for many of the Movable Type consultants out there….
Read More
July 24, 2009
Features of 4.3: Entry Pagination
Posted in News.
Up until the general release of MT 4.3 (beta info here), we are publishing details on the features of 4.3. Today we’re looking at entry pagination. 1,000 Entries One of the categories on my blog is now up to nearly 1,000 entries and it has become difficult to display them. Movable Type offers the ability to split up the category content by date (e.g., Category-Monthly archives), but that would still require me to publish all of the content statically. I could use dynamic publishing, but then I would lose the speed of a statically published page on the front-end. Situations like these, and a long-standing pubilc request, is why we’re now introducing a dynamic way to paginate your index and archive templates using MT-Search. With this solution, you’re able to publish the first 10 or 20 (or whatever you’d like) entries statically and paginate through the remainder dynamically. What’s even better is that it only requires a few changes to your index or archive template to generate the content for MT-Search. Getting Pagination on Your Blog We’ve put together a guide to paginating with static templates that provides details on the new querystring parameters and sample template code. It’s based…
Read More
July 22, 2009
Features of 4.3: Entry Asset Manager
Posted in News.
On Monday, Beau posted about our effort to update the docs for MT 4.3. Today I’m coming to you with information on one of our new features — the entry asset manager. An Easier Way Up until now, the only way to associate an image with an entry was to place it in the entry body. Upon save, Movable Type would write that association to the database. In order to do this, there a form tag was placed around the image (that was stripped out when you published), which was confusing to many. In 4.3, we decided to make this relationship clearer and easier to manage. As you can see to your right, every image associated with this entry is listed in a new sidebar widget on the edit entry page. Hovering over the image shows you a thumbnail. Clicking on ‘Add New’ in the widget only adds the image to the list, not the entry body. This means you can now use the mt:EntryAssets tag to access assets without inserting them into the entry body. Of course, you can still add images to the entry body, but now they won’t have that ugly form tag. Not only is this…
Read More
July 9, 2009
The Beta for Movable Type 4.3 is Now Open
Posted in News.
Earlier this evening we made available the first pre-release version of Movable Type 4.3. For more information about this release, we’ve created an MT 4.3 beta page. There, you can find release notes, known issues, the download link and information on how to submit bugs and get involved in this release. Here’s what you should know: This release has most of 4.3’s new features, including comment pagination and a new entry asset manager. The first release is an alpha (MTOS-4.3a1) and we’ll have 2 more releases during the beta period. The final release will be in 3 weeks. While this release has been stable in our testing, remember this is alpha software and is not intended for use in a production environment. Last, but absolutely not least, we have overhauled the reference documentation for this release. Beau is going to post soon with more details about this, but we’ve already updated nearly 100 pages. He’ll also provide information about how you can get involved in improving the docs. Please download the alpha today and take it for a spin. We rely on input and contributions from community members to make these releases shine and hope you’ll have a hand in…
Read More
July 7, 2009
Looking ahead to MT5
Posted in News.
We are happy to announce that MT5 is coming and invite you to participate. But first, here’s some information on what’s in store for Movable Type 4. Later this month, on July 29th, we’ll be releasing Movable Type 4.3. This release contains comment pagination, a variety of bug fixes and some significant performance and scalability improvements that make it the most robust release ever on MT. Tomorrow, we’ll make available our first pre-release build of 4.3. It will be an alpha, which means we’re still finishing up a few features and the software is absolutely not production ready. So why release it? We want all of you to give it a whirl and try out what we’ve been working on. As we approach the launch date, we’ll continue with several beta releases to fix any bugs found by you and our development team. I’ll have another post up tomorrow with links to the build and information on submitting bugs. In the meantime, work has begun on MT5. We have started the requirements process and early development work on MT5 with particular focus on better content management and ease of use. As we gear up towards the first Movable Type Pro…
Read More
June 17, 2009
MT 4.261: A Small Patch Release
Posted in News.
We just made MT 4.261 available in your Movable Type account and to the community on movabletype.org. The changes were minor and are detailed in the release notes. Primarily, we updated the schema version to include newly created database indexes. If you hadn’t yet downloaded 4.26, we posted about the release last week. For your convenience, here are links to download the new version: MTOS-4.261-en.tar.gz MTOS-4.261-en.zip…
Read More
June 10, 2009
MT 4.26 Now Available
Posted in News.
We just announced the availability of MT 4.26 on the MovableType.com blog. This optional performance release includes bug fixes and feature improvements. No new features have been added. MT 4.26 provides dramatically better search performance for large datasets and improves performance and reliability around TheSchwartz. More details can be found on the release notes, or you can just use the following direct download links to get MTOS 4.26: MTOS-4.26-en.tar.gz MTOS-4.26-en.zip We want to thank everyone in the community for your ongoing feedback and suggestions for improving Movable Type. While this release doesn’t address every bug report and potential performance enhancement, we are continually working to improve your experience and satisfaction with Movable Type. New MTE 4.26 config directives Core DisableObjectCache ObjectCacheLimit RPTFreeMemoryLimit RPTProcessCap RPTSwapMemoryLimit SchwartzClientDeadline SchwartzFreeMemoryLimit SchwartzSwapMemoryLimit Enterprise Pack DatabaseRoles DBCheckSlaveStatus DBMaxReplicationLag DBRetryDuration And some bonus config directives for MT 4.25… New in MT 4.25 config directives Core AssetFileTypes DefaultTemplateSet FastCGIMaxRequests FastCGIMaxTime Commercial Pack EmbedDomainWhitelist Community Pack ReturnToURL…
Read More
