Movable Type Community Solution 1.0 Release Notes

This version of Movable Type was released October 28, 2007.

Terminology “Mismatch”

Movable Type, while originally designed as a blogging platform, is capable of publishing sites of all sorts, including forums. Applications like forums however can often use different terminology or nomenclature when referring to the same thing. This can lead to confusion for some.

Use Publish Queue

It is highly recommended that all Community Solution implementation employ Publish Queue. While MTCS will work 100% of the time with Publish Queue turned off, having Publish Queue will ensure the highest possible up time for your site during times of peak traffic load that may cause high database and publishing loads resulting from lots of users commenting and favoriting content.

Pretty URLs

Many links within the Movable Type Community Solution are non-ideal. Many of these links can be improved and made more SEO friendly by some simple Rewrite Rules that can be used in Apache and other web servers. For example, here is a URL to a user’s profile:

http://www.foo.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&id=1

Which is, by the way, analogous to referencing the same user’s profile via username:

http://www.foo.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&username=byrnereese

Some users may wish this URL to appear as such:

http://www.foo.com/profiles/byrnereese

To do so, here is an Apache mod_rewrite rule to do so:

RewriteRule ^/profiles/(.*)$ /cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&username=$1 [P,L]

Using the Rich Text Editor in your forums

The Community Solution does NOT support the use of the Movable Type Rich Text Editor by default. Users are welcome to embed and utilize the rich text editor on their own. Of course users are also welcome to embed any freely available Rich Text Editor that they wish. Below is a list of freely available rich text editors that can easily be used within your forums:

• YUI Simple WYSIWYG
• FCKEditor
• TinyMCE

Categories and Sub-Categories in Forums

The Forum Template Set is designed to work with only two levels of categories. Using more then two levels of categories will not work.

Users are welcome, however, to customize the forum templates to build as rich a hierarchy for their forums and discussions as they wish.

HTML Email Support

Currently Movable Type is only capable of sending plain text emails. Please make sure that your email templates do NOT use HTML.

Default Editor Fields

Default Editor fields found on the Entry Preferences screen have no effect on user

Template Sets do NOT install global templates

Packs are the only mechanism by which global templates can be installed. Template sets are designed to installed blog-specific template sets only and are not able to install global templates.

Community Template Sets do NOT support themes

The Community Blog and Community Forum template sets do not currently support restyling via themes selected from the Design->Styles menu. These exemplar template sets were built with the Tristan Blue style, and it is expected that customers using community features would want to customize the templates beyond what is possible using stylesheets.

Community Solution in Multi-Language Environments

The MTCS is capable of supporting multi-blog systems in which blogs are deployed in different languages. However, some complexities arise in scenarios where blogs using different languages want to share the same global template. Users should be aware of the following limitations of MTCS:

• MT supports having the same global template module exist in multiple languages. For example, if you need a header that is translated into English and another that is in French, then that is possible, so long as those two modules do not share the same name.
• MT only supports having Global System Templates and Global Email Templates in a single language. The language of those templates is determined by the language of the system at the time the MTCS was installed. For example, if the system language was set to French when MTCS was installed then the text of all email templates will be translated into French prior to being installed in the system. The language of these templates is not easily changed, but can be. Consult support if help is needed in this regard.

NetPBM Support

The use of avatars/userpics have been extensively tested using the ImageMagick image manipulation library. However, not a lot of testing has been done to verify that MTCS works with NetPBM (another image manipulation library). In theory it should work though.