What’s New in Movable Type 4.1
Below is a list of the major new features found in Movable Type 4.1.
User Interface Refinements
Movable Type 4.0 was an ambitious redesign of the Movable Type product. This most recent release has given us an opportunity to refine that design a great deal:
- The compose screen for entries and pages has been slightly redesigned.
- The backgrounds across the entire application have been touched up to make the content on the page easier to read.
Editable Assets
User can now edit assets previously created within the system. Movable Type’s asset management framework also makes it possible for additional asset types (like Flickr photos, YouTube videos and more) to be defined and managed from within Movable Type.
The edit assets screen also included useful information like the size of the image, the permutations and thumbnails that have been generated for that image, as well as a listing of entries and page that asset appears within.
Windows Live Writer Support
Support for Windows LiveWriter has been added to the core platform, specifically support for the XMLRC functions wp.newPage and wp.editPage that allows you to create pages as well as entries. In addition we have made a number of other enhancements to our XML-RPC API to maximize its compatibility with as many blogging clients as possible.
Template Sets
Developers can now register template sets through the plugin API, and users can select and apply template sets to new and/or existing blogs.
Performance Enhancements
We are always looking for ways to make Movable Type better, faster and stronger. In this release we have:
- made Database enhancements and new indexes from mediatemple
- minimized Javascript and CSS files to increase performance and download speeds
- improved the upload dialog to minimize the number of page requests required to create an asset in the system
Valid, Well-formed XHTML Post Content
Movable Type’s Rich Text Editor is now completely modular allowing a developer to create a plugin to swap in the rich text editor of their choice. A plugin for the popular FCK editor which outputs semantically valid XHTML has been created by Six Apart and is available in our plugin directory.
Template Tag Enhancements
A number of new template tags have been created. But more importantly, the Movable Type template tag language has been expanded a great deal to include new control flow constructs (If, Else if, Else), looping constructs (for), arithmetic operators (plus, minus, etc) as well as new variable types (hashes, arrays, etc) to make it a far more Turing complete programming language.
Content Replication Across Multiple Servers
The popular Publish Queue feature of Movable Type has been expanded to now allow administrators to rsync and replicate published files across multiple servers.
Globally Shared Template Modules
This feature allows for blogs to share design elements across each other. This allows designers to make changes in a single place place, but have those changes reflected across an unlimited number of blogs and web sites. and have those changes reflected globally.
Userpics
Authors can now upload an image or userpic for themselves that can then be displayed alongside the entries and comments they create within the system.
Commercial Features
These features will be available to paying customers only:
Universal Template Set
The Universal Template Set (UTS) is a complete web site design using Movable Type’s template set and theming infrastructure. UTS was created to:
- make it easy for users to create not just a blog, but an entire web site — complete with an About and Contact page, and more.
- produce a professional and clean, well designed web site
- build a set of templates that is more intuitive and easy to customize, with simpler HTML and CSS than the default templates.
- create a set of “smart templates” that allows authors with very few technical skills to modify the behavior of the web site.
Custom Fields
The Commercial version of Movable Type now fully incorporates the popular Custom Fields plugin into its distribution. This feature allows users to:
- customize the input elements associated with a blog by adding additional form fields for uploading images, inserting assets, creating text fields, pull-down menus, checkboxes, radio buttons and more.
- define custom fields on a blog-by-blog basis
- define system-wide custom fields to be shared across all blogs within the system
- reorder the placement of fields on the edit entry and pages screens using a simple drag-and-drop interface
- administrators to define which fields are required or optional
- extend not only entries and pages with custom fields, but also folders, categories and users
- easily embed custom field data within a published template or page using sample code provided for you automatically by the system
Previously…
Each time we release a version of Movable Type we make significant enhancements to the product. If you are upgrading to Movable Type from versions as far back at Movable Type 3.x, you might find the following resources valuable:
