December 31, 2007
A tour of Movable Type 4.1’s asset editing functionality
By Byrne Reese and posted in Tips & Tricks.
Movable Type 4.0 provided users for the first time with the features necessary for Movable Type to serve as a light weight content management system for web sites. It also provided a framework to developers to define their own custom asset types as illustrated through the Media Manager and Podcasting plugins for Movable Type. Movable Type 4.1, currently in beta, takes asset management one step further by allowing administrators and author to more easily edit, tag and organize the assets within their Movable Type install. What follows is a brief overview of some of these new features. Filter Assets by Type As you expand upon the types of assets you manage within Movable Type, you can easily filter them to see just your Flickr photos, or your YouTube videos, or your images or your podcasts… you get the idea. One Click Previews When viewing your list of assets, not only does Movable Type now show a small thumbnail of each asset, but you can zoom in on the asset without leaving the page by clicking the small magnifying glass associated with each asset. Asset Auditing From the asset details screen you can view a list of all the pages and…
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December 27, 2007
Integrating Movable Type with FogBugz
By Byrne Reese and posted in Plugins.
We were honored when FogCreek granted us a license to use FogBugz for public case tracking and project management for the Movable Type Open Source project, which is the largest deployment of FogBugz for an open source project. In an effort to repay their kindness, but also to help keep the community as up-to-date as possible on the latest known issues with the product, Chris Hall has implemented a new Movable Type plugin known as MT Fogger. It is a plugin that exposes within Movable Type a set of template tags making it possible to query and display search results from FogBugz within a web site or blog. If you didn’t know, Chris Hall is the man behind the curtain that responds personally to all of the feedback that comes into FogBugz via our feedback submission form. He is also the lead QA engineer for Movable Type (and MTOS) and the creator of MT Booter, a handy QA tool for generating test data for Movable Type….
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December 26, 2007
MTOS Subversion Tips
By Byrne Reese and posted in Tips & Tricks.
Developers looking to stay plugged into the bleeding edge of Movable Type without having to depend upon nightly builds may like the following tip which shows how one can always access the following builds reliably and predictably without having to worry about branches, tags or anything else about how the source code is organized: The last official release that one can download from our web site The last stable release, which includes minimally tested milestone beta builds The most recent source code in active development Pointers to each of these are maintained for your convenience by the development team. Simply execute the following command and you will check out three copies of Movable Type corresponding to each of the above states of the source code (the source code will be placed within a directory called mtos-latest): svn co http://code.sixapart.com/svn/movabletype/latest mtos-latest When that is complete you can navigate to the dev directory found within the mtos-latest directory that was just created for you and execute svn up to update to the most recent code in development. Executing the following command will reveal that this is made possible through a set of three svn:externals: svn propget svn:externals http://code.sixapart.com/svn/movabletype/latest In layman’s terms, these…
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December 24, 2007
MTOS Project Updates
By Byrne Reese and posted in News.
Last week we released Movable Type 4.1 Beta 2 which included a number of new features for the open source project as well, including: AtomPub Support - a core mission for MTOS is to support core Internet standards, which includes the Atom Publishing Protocol, or “AtomPub” for short. Revamped Asset Editing Interface - CMSWire recently wrote a piece entitled Movable Type 4.1 Goes Beyond Blogging - and they are right. But it is not just the commercial product that is headed in this direction. The open source project too is also becoming a more flexible tool for light weight content management — as is evidenced by Movable Type’s extensible asset management framework, and the work that Beau has been doing to expand upon the user experience around managing online assets. Virtually all of the changes in the last beta, including the ones listed above, can also be found in the latest MTOS builds. Speaking of which, if you are a person who enjoys living on the bleeding edge then the best resource for you is still our nightly builds, which ever since we completed our subversion migration to code.sixapart.com have become far more meaningful. Now that primary development of Movable…
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December 21, 2007
AtomPub Support and New Edit Asset screens: MT4.1 Beta 2 Released
By Byrne Reese and posted in News.
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…
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December 13, 2007
Movable Type 4.1 Beta, and a new Reseller Program
By Anil Dash and posted in News.
This week’s launch of the Movable Type Open Source project was huge news for our community. But as part of that announcement, we promised even more news to come. So today, we’re introducing some of the next steps that will outline how we’re going to fueling that community in the coming weeks and months. We’re beginning the beta of Movable Type 4.1 today, with tons of new features. We’re announcing the Professional Pack, the first of the extended benefits that paid users of MT will be receiving. We’re launching the Movable Type reseller program designed to offer resellers a 30% discount that you can pass on to your customers or keep for yourself. Each of these announcements on its own would be big news, but one of the things we wanted to demonstrate was how much we value our paying customers who’ve supported MT’s development (the Professional Pack and MT 4.1 will be a free upgrade for all paying customers of MT 4.0), as well as how having an open platform will help benefit everyone who uses Movable Type. Enough talk — let’s show you what’s coming! What’s new in Movable Type 4.1? Here’s what you can look forward to…
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December 12, 2007
Movable Type Open Source
By Anil Dash.
As of today, and forever forward, Movable Type is open source. This means you can freely modify, redistribute, and use Movable Type for any purpose you choose. Just want the details and downloads? Skip to the bottom. But you might like the story of how we got here. Like many of us on the team, some of you have been waiting for this moment for years. For a business, an open source license affects boring things like how a product is created, updated, and distributed. But the open source movement has always been about something more important: Freedom. With a name like “Movable Type”, we’ve always been keenly aware of the importance of freedom, as that name echoes both the birth of the printing press and the creation of independent media that an individual can control. Our goal has always been to create the best blogging platform in the world and to put that power in the hands of as many people as possible. And we want to honor a tradition of openness that Movable Type has embodied for over six years: From TrackBack to Atom to OpenID, we’ve always invented and popularized key technologies that were delivered with open…
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December 4, 2007
Jim Ramsey on Designing for Flow
By Anil Dash.
Jim Ramsey, our lead designer on Movable Type (and the guy responsible for the gorgeous design of Movable Type.com), has just published Designing for Flow over at A List Apart. Jim eloquently describes the idea of “flow” in his essay:Flow, as a mental state, was first proposed by psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and is characterized by a distorted sense of time, a lack of self-consciousness, and complete engagement in the task at hand. Software engineers might feel it when they’re writing code, gamers might feel it when playing Guitar Hero III, Christopher Cross felt it when he went sailing. For designers, it’s exactly the feeling we hope to promote in the people who use our sites.We’ve been proud of the huge number of talented designers that have been members of the MT community from day one, and hope that talking through a little of our design process can inspire even more creative work from all of you….
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December 3, 2007
Appnel on Code
By Anil Dash.
Even though he got a shout-out in our last post, it’s worth giving some link love to Tim Appnel’s “On Code” blog again. He’s doing one of the best jobs of blogging regularly about the nuts and bolts of Movable Type, a topic he knows well as one of the longest-standing members of the most technical parts of the MT community. Over the past six (!) years, Tim’s done a great job of not just understanding and explaining functional details of Movable Type, but of building award-winning plugins and of holding our feet to the fire at Six Apart when he thinks it’s in the best interest of MT. It’s a thrill to see him posting frequently about MT with his uniquely informed perspective, and it’s well worth adding his site to your list of regular reads if you want to keep up with a strong independent voice in the MT community.And of course, if you value Tim’s insights into creating content and community with Movable Type, it’s worth finding out more about Appnel Solutions to help with consulting….
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November 20, 2007
Community Conversations
By Anil Dash.
We talk a lot about community here on movabletype.org, so it’s only appropriate that we hear back from all of you, especially after the recent release of the Movable Type Community Solution. There’s been a terrific response, so let’s cover some highlights:Our new Community Solution-powered Movable Type Forums are starting to show off what an MT-powered forum can do. The forums themselves are still in beta as we test out exactly how they’ll work, but they’re already worth a look.Jesse Gardner’s been building out an MTCS-powered site, and he’s offered some enticing first impressions of the new offering.Tim Appnel weighs in with his own thoughts, picking up on a key point: “The Community Solution does indeed provided the ability to host forums using the MT engine, but it does a lot more too.”And finally, Learning Movable Type has been absolutely rocking lately. Check out just some of the recent tutorials:Using Favicons and Gravatar in MT4Making Flickr’s Blog This work with MT4Installing Movable Type under IIS on WindowsWell, we could go on listing these forever, you might as well just subscribe to the site. And if you’ve got some expertise of your own to share, the site’s accepting new contributors so…
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October 28, 2007
Tricks and Treats
By Byrne Reese.
Here are some highlights of the happenings in the Movable Type world for the week before Halloween. Read/WriteWeb upgraded to Movable Type 4 - congratulations Richard and team! A tip of the hat to the Media Temple team as well for their expert help in the upgrade and migration process. The (mt) people really know their stuff - they helped to isolate some significant performance enhancements that will have a lasting impact for all MT4 users starting with the next release of Movable Type. Todd of Geek News Central got frustrated with Movable Type’s podcasting support. We listened. And thanks to his feedback, there is now a more complete solution for podcasters on Movable Type. His feedback will also result in other changes being made to the core to make Movable Type an even better media blogging platform. Thank you Todd. The Movable Type team is gearing up for a private beta of the Movable Type Community Solution, and the public debut of its functionality powering parts of MovableType.org. In some shameless self promotion, I recently added YouTube and Flickr support to Media Manager, extending the plugin for the first time beyond books and DVDs from Amazon. One of the…
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October 16, 2007
Some links that deserve a little fan fare
By Byrne Reese and posted in News.
Just a quick post to share some links and resources that have been created or have caught my eye recently: Recommended Plugins - we have added a page that lists a more complete list of plugins selected by community plugin directory editors. Recently Added Plugins - we have also added a more complete listing of recently added plugins.. Tidy Templates - Tim Appnel has created a plugin to help publishers normalize their Movable Type tags to use a consistent style and syntax. Very nice. SezWho - I have been seeing SezWho, an interesting service that provides universal commenter profiles across the web, from time to time on sites I visit from time to time so it was good to see that they also have a Movable Type Plugin to make it easy for anyone to use their service. How to Build a Style Catcher Repository - Movable Type makes it really easy for people to browse various style collections scattered across the web and then to download, install and apply those styles to a blog - all from within Movable Type. This recently published guide details how developers and designers can construct their own style repositories and allow Movable Type…
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October 11, 2007
Podcast with David Recordon about the Open Social Graph
By Byrne Reese and posted in Just for Fun.
In last week’s ProNet conference call, which is quickly evolving into a call-in internet talk show of sorts, I spoke with David Recordon, the man leading the effort behind the Open Social Graph Project, or “Glue.” If you are interested in learning more about: the open social graph what actually is the “social graph” what the goals are for the project what are the principals that govern its development what kind of products one might build with this technology what is XFN and what are the other protocols and standards that this project is taking advantage of Then this is a great podcast for you. Listen to it now (it is about 41 minutes long); and when you are done check out some of our previous podcasts posted to our ProNet Vox Community. During the call I also gave updates about the Movable Type Open Source project, the Movable Type product roadmap, new plugins like Template Hammer and Ghostwriter and much, much more. Remember our ProNet conference calls are open to the public. Anyone is welcome to join and participate in the conversation we have there….
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September 21, 2007
Movable Type 4.01, scaling Movable Type, “Flat Templates” and other new plugins from our Hackathon
By Byrne Reese.
The release of our iPhone plugin for Movable Type is a tough act to follow. It has been very well received and has been the tipping point for many to switch to Movable Type from other platforms. But a lot has happened since we released iMT. For those of you not closely following our regular flow of betas, we released Movable Type 4.01 - a release we recommend all Movable Type users to upgrade to. It contains a number of key fixes, updates and a security enhancement. Most notably however is a fix that provides a remarkable boost to Movable Type’s performance and responsiveness. Users have reported seeing a dramatic decrease in the time it takes to publish their web sites as well as an increase in the responsiveness of the application. Of course Movable Type 4.01 also contained a number of key fixes to support the release of our first pack or “solution”: the Movable Type Enterprise Solution. I will refer those interested in that specific product to our corporate Movable Type website. However I would like to highlight several key resources that we created for our customers that operate at an enterprise scale, but that we think have…
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September 10, 2007
One more reason to buy an iPhone
By Byrne Reese and posted in Plugins.
For a long time now I have been one of those iPhone hold outs that insists on waiting for the next generation before taking the iPhone plunge. But today could be the tipping point for me and many other Movable Type users like me. Today we are happy to announce Movable Type for the iPhone and iPod Touch, made possible through a plugin developed by Brad Choate that makes use of the design developed by Walt Dickinson for TypePad. The plugin works by installing an alternate template set that is automatically used in place of the primary Movable Type user interface when the application is accessed via an iPhone or iPod Touch. The integration with Movable Type is totally seamless. Walt has done an amazing job creating a truly thoughtful user experience. He certainly had the option to just boil down the application to a smaller, more browsable version of itself. But he didn’t. Instead Walt designed the ideal user experience for iPhone from scratch. He created custom graphics, layouts and entirely new screens for the application in order to make this plugin feel like a completely native iPhone application. The plugin, and its design, is completely free and open…
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September 10, 2007
Movable Type 4.01 Release Candidate 1
By Byrne Reese and posted in News.
Last week we released Movable Type 4.01 Release Candidate 1. This release contains a number of fixes, but a couple in particular that we feel we should highlight for our users: A fix for an XSS vulnerability that affects blogs in which the primary Movable Type application is hosted on a different domain then their blog. The vulnerability results from a commenter name of an authenticated user that contains apostrophes. For users who host their blog and application on different domains, we ask that you please upgrade to 4.01 when it is released. A fix for a low-level bug that affects Movable Type’s data abstract layer called Data::ObjectDriver. In this bug, any page within the application or on the published blog that needs to compose links to the next and previous entries in a sequence of entries, will result in Movable Type querying and pulling from the database more entries then is technically necessary. This has an adverse affect on performance and memory utilization during publishing operations and page load operations. This bug has the largest impact on large blogs with thousands of entries. For users with blogs of this size we strongly recommend you upgrade. The rest of the…
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September 7, 2007
Podcast with Dan Wolfgang
By Byrne Reese and posted in Plugins.
In this week’s bi-week community conference call we decided to shake things up a bit and change the format of the call. So, in addition to briefing the community of Movable Type news, the product roadmap and other Six Apart developments, I spent the majority of the time interviewing and getting to know one of the callers and members of our community. The lucky winner? Dan Wolfgang, the creator of one of Movable Type’s most popular plugins: Better File Uploader, “BFU” as the community calls it. In our conversation we talk about how he got started using Movable Type, how he became a developer on the platform and the process he went through in building BFU. He also shared with me what’s next for the MT4 compatible version of MT4, something he plans to release in the coming weeks alongside the multitude of other plugins our developer community is creating. Dan was a great sport in allowing me to put him on the spot as I did; for which we should all be incredibly grateful….
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September 5, 2007
A Plethora of Plugins
By Anil Dash.
Movable Type 4.0’s only been out three weeks, and we’ve seen dozens of poweful new plugins for the platform, with new ones popping up every day. As someone who first installed Movable Type as a beta six years ago (!), I’ve never seen a time where more compelling or just plain fun plugins have been launched in such a short period of time.Because a lot of us have been busy uploading the new “Works With MT4” plugins to our blogs, it’s probably worth taking a look to see what all the plugin developers in our community have been up to. And of course, the vast majority of older plugins still work with MT4 as well — these are just some of the ones that show of MT4’s features the best. Check ‘em out:Never Get Dash-BoredGoogle AdSense Widget: David Raynes lets you keep an eye on the bottom line from your MT4 dashboard, showing your recent earnings information from Google’s AdSense service.Google Analytics Widget: One of the breakout additions for MT4, this popular plugin lets you see your daily traffic right on MT4’s dashboard, with David Raynes making smart use of the built-in charting functions in the platform.FeedBurner Widget: Just like…
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August 31, 2007
Happy Labor Day Weekend - MT4.01 Beta 2 now available
By Byrne Reese and posted in News.
A quick note to wish everyone in the Movable Type community a Happy Labor Day Weekend, and to inform everyone that we released Movable Type 4.01 beta 2. This has been an excellent beta period thanks to everyone who has been submitting bug reports and patches to the MT team. We have managed to address a lot of issues affecting people upgrading and migrating blog content to Movable Type 4.0; plus we have made a lot of progress on addressing issues raised by developers as they continue to build some incredibly innovative plugins on top of MT. For a complete list of issues addressed in this latest release, check out the change log on the MT 4.01 Beta homepage. We expect this to be the last beta before we officially release Movable Type 4.01 to the public. Thanks again to everyone who has been contributing to this process, your feedback has been invaluable….
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August 30, 2007
More Docs Than A Hospital
By Anil Dash.
There’s a whole pile of new and updated documentation for MT4 that we’ve been working on updating, based specifically on the requests we’ve gotten from the community and from developers. Some highlights:An all-new introduction to the MT4 Developer’s Guide. All of the developer documentation available has been better organized, so it’s easier to find.Transformer Callbacks documentation, for plugins that change the way MT4’s screens look.Object Callbacks documentation, to create plugins that hook into the core object actions that make MT4 go.Information on how to package your plugins.And one of the coolest new features in MT4, how to build MT Dashboard Widgets.You can even go all the way and create entirely new screens within the application. Do you lean more towards the design side of things than the developer side? No problem. You’ll want to check out:MT4’s Comment Templates for Users of MT3 or Earlier, A.K.A. “MT4 templates for mere mortals”. If you’ve been confused or intimidated by all the includes and variables in the new MT4 templates, this is a great place to start.An introductory Designer’s Guide to MT4 Templates, which is a great place to get started.A practical example of how to create comment feeds.And one of the most…
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August 27, 2007
Its not just a blogging tool anymore
By Byrne Reese and posted in Plugins.
More and more people are making the switch to Movable Type or choosing Movable Type for their next big web project because people are beginning to see that MT4 is not just a blogging tool anymore. In actuality It is very capable web site management tool with its: Built in support for pages Ability to allow users to manage image, audio and video content Extensible Asset Management System Centralized management capability of multiple blogs and web sites These features are helping businesses see how Movable Type 4.0 can be used to replace large bulky Content Management Systems at a fraction of the cost. And nothing illustrates Movable Type’s content management capabilities more than the community’s most popular plugin: Custom Fields. In fact, when asked the question, “if you could have one and only one plugin installed in Movable Type, which would it be?” more people indicated Custom Fields, or the ability to add custom fields to a blog than any other plugin. Which shows, Custom Fields is not just for businesses because it allows anyone to build the web site they need, not the web site we think they need. Before we started development on 4.01 we asked Arvind, “what…
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August 24, 2007
Listen in on our Bi-weekly Community Conference Call…
By Byrne Reese and posted in Just for Fun.
Every other Wednesday Six Apart hosts a public conference call with members from the Movable Type developer and professional community. These calls are a great forum for those individuals to talk with members from the Six Apart product team directly and for us in turn to give greater insight into our plans and roadmap for Movable Type, as well as some of the other products Six Apart produces. We record each conference call for those folks who are not able to attend, and for the benefit of the community at large. In each call we cover a wealth of topics, and this week was no exception: The release of the Movable Type 4.01 Beta New plugins recently submitted by the community to our Plugin Directory The upcoming release of Custom Fields and Media Manager for MT4 An overview of the Movable Type 4 Enterprise Pack A discussion about the Movable Type 4 Community Pack - what led us to develop the Community Pack, and what features are we planning for that product How to best organize documentation and manage contributions from the community Design goals of Movable Type 4 and how we built it to better serve its developer community…
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August 22, 2007
Movable Type 4.01 Beta
By Byrne Reese and posted in News.
A little more than a week ago we released Movable Type 4.0 and the response it has received has been extraordinary. More and more people are upgrading to and making the switch to MT4 every day, and with every new user comes more feedback, and with Movable Type gaining so much momentum we wanted to do our best to keep up. So we are happy to announce the release of Movable Type 4.01 Beta 1 which has three primary goals: To address high priority issues found by users following the release of Movable Type 4.0; the majority of these issues revolving around issues users faced with upgrading from previous versions of Movable Type and migrating to MT4 from other blogging platforms. To make the necessary changes to the core application in support of the upcoming availability of the Movable Type Enterprise Solution. To support developers who are in the process of upgrading their existing plugins and developing entirely new plugins for the MT4 platform. We expect that this release will cover all the primary issues in MT 4.0 and do not anticipate the need to release a MT 4.02 or other 4.0x release unless any security or other critical issues…
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August 16, 2007
Holy Moly! Graphical visitor stats for your blog.
By Byrne Reese and posted in Plugins.
Check out the latest plugin from the community: real time visitor statistics for your Movable Type 4.0 dashboard. Mark Carey, the developer of the plugin and the guy behind the very popular site MT Hacks has been busy building a number of different plugins specifically designed for MT4, not to mention updating some of his other popular plugins like Fast Search and some user interface plugins to customize the user interface to work better for him. And that’s not all, the community has produced a number of other great plugins in the last couple of days. For example, those of you pining for the olden days, Arvind has made a great retro dashboard widget called “My Blogs” which surfaces an MT3 style blog listing widget for your MT4 dashboard. Cool!And for those of you pining for the even older days, you might recognize the name of another one of our plugin authors: Ben Trott. His Refeed plugin makes it easier than ever to turn any RSS or Atom feed into posts on your blog. I know I plan to use this plugin personally to aggregate my twitters, my Flickr photos, my Vox posts into a single unified system.What plugins would…
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August 16, 2007
Love Me
By Byrne Reese and posted in Just for Fun.
The Movable Type community is positively buzzing with excitement. Plugins are being added to the new plugin directory every day and developers are busy at updating their plugins to take advantage of MT4’s new APIs and architecture. Plus we are hearing of more and more reports of people upgrading and switch to MT4 every day and every hour because, I mean - come on, what’s not to love?In fact you can show your love for MT with the awesome new desktop wallpaper created by Jesse of PlasticMind and MovableTweak, the designer behind the wall paper he created during the beta….
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August 14, 2007
Why we made Movable Type 4.0
By Anil Dash.
When our co-founders Ben & Mena Trott first launched Movable Type almost six years ago, their words were pretty modest: “We’ve never claimed to be the best. We’ve never presented Movable Type as the program that will revolutionize weblogging. We’re just developing a system with a lot of the features that we’ve heard users are looking for. Luckily, we’ve received a lot of good word of mouth.” But while the first description of the tool was fairly modest, what’s been astounding is the things people have done with the tool. And perhaps the biggest surprise to all of us who’ve worked on Movable Type over the years isn’t that people have done amazing things with MT — we always knew that potential was there. What we never could have guessed, what we didn’t even know to hope for, was the impact that the blogs created by the Movable Type community would have on the world. So today, almost six years later, we have that history in mind as we launch Movable Type 4. We’ll naturally be talking about new features and the cool things you can do with the platform. (The movabletype.com site is a great place for getting the…
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August 14, 2007
Introducing the New Movable Type Plugin Directory
By Byrne Reese and posted in Plugins.
Today we are excited to announce the official release of a brand new and completely redesigned Movable Type Plugin Directory. This new directory is a resource designed and developed by and for the community.The Directory is powered completely by Movable Type 4.0 enabling us to build a site that contains a number new features and enhancements its predecessor never had:local authentication and registration to make it easier for developers to manage their contributionscustomizable screenshot slideshows for users to more easily preview a plugin’s functionalityratings to help the community inform one another about what is most popular and most recommendedreviews and comments allowing users to leave feedback to the author of the plugintags to assist visitors in navigation and discovery of pluginsrestructured category hierarchy for a simplified and more organized directoryLogin or create an account now!It really is a whole new world for Movable Type: there’s a new product, a new web site, a new plugin directory and a bunch of new plugins that work with MT4… and believe it or not, we are still just getting started. The coming weeks and months still have a lot in store for the community. Stay tuned!…
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August 13, 2007
Reports from the Upgrade-a-thon
By Byrne Reese and posted in Tips & Tricks.
Last week’s Movable Type 4.0 events were a huge success. On Tuesday we hosted a day long “Upgrade-a-thon” where we invited people to join us in Movable Type’s IRC chat room and on the phone to help a number of people with migrating to Movable Type from other platforms as well upgrading older versions of Movable Type to the latest and greatest MT4. Lots of people successfully upgraded that day using the Movable Type 4.0 Upgrade Guide, and many more reported having successfully upgraded earlier on in Movable Type 4.0’s beta process. I would like to thank everyone who participated that day. Your feedback and your many questions allowed us to refine our documentation even further in order to pave the way for even more MT4 converts. Who knew that just by asking questions you would be helping others?We learned a lot about how to upgrade to MT4. So we thought we’d share it with you.What follows are some of the most frequently asked questions from that day with links to the documentation that resulted from those questions. If one of your questions was not answered, then please, attach a comment to this post and we will do our best…
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August 8, 2007
Today’s Events
By Anil Dash.
As we’ve mentioned, we’re hosting two event today to help the Movable Type community get ready for the release of MT4. Both events are free and open to anyone who wants to participate online — here’s the information you’ll need to know to get connected.Upgrade-A-Thon: 10am Pacific Time (1pm Eastern/5pm GMT) If you’re thinking of making the jump to MT4, we’ll have the most experienced experts in the world by your side when you do it. You can join via screencast (view the live video in your browser) or IRC (a free text chat system) and we’ll have a call-in phone conference and AIM chat room as well.MT4 Training on Consulting and Strategy: 12pm Pacific Time (3pm Eastern/7pm GMT) Our sales and product teams will teach you about what MT4 can do, and how you can benefit from it as a web developer, designer, consultant, or administrator. You can join via screencast (view the live video in your browser) or IRC (a free text chat system) and we’ll have a call-in phone conference and AIM chat room as well.To get ready, you might wish to visit the Adobe Connect screencast conference sites (linked above) as it can take a few…
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August 7, 2007
The Road to Movable Type 4
By Byrne Reese and posted in News.
While the Movable Type Beta started about 8 weeks ago, the road to Movable Type 4.0 began well over a year ago when we released a preview of what we had planned on being Movable Type 3.5, codenamed Wheeljack. That version was a test release available only through the Movable Type code repository, but was used by a number of users and it was then when we first as the first step to start collecting feedback about what would ultimately become Movable Type 4.0.As 2007 approached, we began to feel strongly that Movable Type needed more than just a powerful new asset management system — after five years of working with and learning from our community, it was obvious our flagship platform was due for a major rethinking. So we began engaging the community in a broader discussion about what you wanted to achieve with Movable Type. This is what we heard from you:Better documentationA larger, more vibrant communityA WYSIWYG editorAll the functionality you need without the need to install pluginsBetter default templates and more template tags to make life easier on designersA more intuitive install experienceMore content management featuresA product that felt new againThe innovation that got you excited…
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August 6, 2007
Movable Type 4.0 Release Candidate 3
By Byrne Reese and posted in News.
Earlier this evening we released Movable Type 4.0 RC3, and we have updated our change log and list of known issues according. This change log is shorter then usual as we begin to converge on a release. This week, while the web production team works on building out a new Movable Type (dot com) web site, the product team will be devoting a lot of its time to our developers to assist them as much as we can as they begin to test their plugins on the new product. There will be a number of places you can find us and reach us this week if you have questions or issues you can’t seem to find a solution for:IRC - the chat room #movabletype chat room on freenode is almost always populated by Movable Type engineers, support personnel, QA staff and ProNet members just waiting to help. ProNet Mailing List - The ProNet mailing list has always been where Six Apart’s most talented professionals, engineers and designers alike, gather to share ideas and seek support from one another. There is no cost to joining the mailing list - everyone is welcome.Developer Mailing List - Tim Appnel has been the gracious…
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August 3, 2007
Podcast Feed Template for Movable Type 4.0
By Byrne Reese.
Movable Type 4.0 will be the first release of Movable Type that has podcasting support built into the core application, with no need for a plugin or additional software of services. In creating the plugin known as Feed Manager, I found that, for many, podcasting is a lot like “Retsyn”: They have very little idea what it actually is, but they know they need it. That is why I compiled a simple podcasting guide for users and potential users of Feed Manager.To summarize, podcasting is at its core the ability to subscribe to a feed of rich media files that can be played in your media player of choice. Podcasters using Movable Type can make video and audio available through their Atom feeds with one simple addition to their Atom feed template which for any given entry will output the media assets associated with that entry:<mt:EntryAssets><mt:SetVarBlock name=”assettype”><mt:AssetType></mt:SetVarBlock><mt:if name=”assettype” eq=”audio”> <link rel=”enclosure” type=”<mt:AssetMimeType>” title=”<mt:AssetLabel>” href=”<mt:AssetURL>” length=”<mt:AssetProperty property=”file_size” format=”0”>” /></mt:if></mt:EntryAssets>Or users can download the following complete Atom Feed template that contains the template code above.In a couple of days we will be publishing the complete documentation for all of Movable Type’s template tags. At last count there are over 70 new template…
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August 3, 2007
Ready for the Real World?
By Byrne Reese.
In these final stages of the MT4 beta, each day we ask ourselves, “will this build be the final build for the release?” To answer that question there is no better place to turn to then the real world. Yesterday for example, Webbalert, a new technology video blog anchored by Morgan Webb, launched with great fanfare. Webbalert is one of many new web sites and blogs being launched on top of the Movable Type 4.0 platform. Every new blog powered by Movable Type 4.0 is a huge endorsement of the product and an indicator that MT4 is ready for the real world.If you have launched or are launching a blog powered by Movable Type 4.0 and would like help raising awareness of your new venture, then we want to hear from you. Leave us a note on this post or send an email to Byrne Reese, the Product Manager for Movable Type, and we can look into helping you promote and bring exposure to your new blog….
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August 3, 2007
Movable Type 4.0 Release Candidate 2
By Byrne Reese and posted in News.
Last night we silently released our second release candidate and took another significant step towards a full fledged release of Movable Type 4.0. This release contains its usual impressive number of fixes, but if you look at the change log, the vast majority of issues addressed had to do with browser compatibility and minor style fixes. Many of the issues fixed were found by the community, but a large number were also found by our dedicated QA staff who have been engaged in a systematic and thorough walk through of a complex testing matrix looking at how Movable Type performs on multiple operating systems, databases and browsers. Here are some highlights from the Movable Type 4.0 RC2 release:A new configuration directive called “AllowedTextFilters” has been added that allows administrators to define what list of text editors (such as Markdown, Rich Text, Textile and others) they permit users on their system to use. A number of browser compatibility issues across Safari, Internet Explorer 6 and 7 and Firefox following an exhaustive sweep of the application.Movable Type has been translated into 5 different languages including German, French, Dutch, Spanish and Japanese.The plugin management screens have been significantly redesigned to give administrators a…
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July 30, 2007
Movable Type is fluent in French, German, Dutch, Spanish and Japanese too!
By Byrne Reese.
One of Movable Type’s strength’s has always been its long history of being a truly international product which is why Six Apart has offices not only in San Francisco, but also in Tokyo and Paris as well. During the past six weeks while the engineers have been working on the next version of Movable Type, our team of translators has been working on creating versions of Movable Type in Dutch, German, French, Spanish and Japanese. With the release of MT4 RC1, those translations are finally ready and available for download. To change your preferred language, just edit your profile by clicking on your username found in the upper right corner of every screen. Then select the language you prefer and click the ‘Save’ button. And voila! Movable Type will start speaking another language.Remember, we are not done yet, and our translators welcome any feedback you have. So if you spot a spelling error, or a funky, not-quite-right translation, please let us know….
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July 25, 2007
Movable Type 4 Release Candidate: Ready To Go
By Byrne Reese and posted in News.
About seven weeks ago we released to the world the first beta of Movable Type 4.0. In that time the Beta has been downloaded tens of thousands of times, bringing new users into the MT4 community at a rate that’s never gone under one every minute. And on top of that, thousands more have tried the Amazon EC2 image and MT4 demo site that community members have set up to get the new version in the hands of even more testers.Since then, all of you have sent hundreds upon hundreds of emails to us giving us your feedback, reporting bugs, and most importantly sharing your passion and insight about how blogging should work. Now’s your chance to get a good sense of how our community’s efforts have created something truly special.We incorporated over three dozen new themes built right into Movable Type because you told us how important a good collection of professional designs is. We bundled podcasting support into the core application and integrated it with MT4’s smart media library, to let you easily create podcasts, videocasts, or even photocasts from the content you upload. You told us you loved the WYSIWYG editor but wanted it to be even…
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July 24, 2007
Services restored and gearing up for a release
By Byrne Reese and posted in News.
Today at approximately 1:40pm PST this web site along with all of Six Apart’s web sites and services suffered a major interruption of service due to a power outage that affected our entire hosting facility. Power was restored to the facility by 4:00pm but it took several hours to restore all of our services to full capacity. But we are now back.It was our intent to release a new version of Movable Type 4.0 today, but under the circumstances we decided to delay the release 24 hours. Looking on the bright side, however, this outage may have given us just enough time to close out some of the last remaining known issues in the application, and may very well have helped us to reach the important milestone of releasing our first official release candidate of Movable Type 4.0.So as we work through the night to verify the most recent builds, we will be going through the usual process of updating the change log and our list of known issues. We will also be working on compiling our final set of release notes to provide users with as much knowledge and information about the upcoming release as we can. Before we…
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July 17, 2007
Podcasting? Yep, we got that.
By Byrne Reese and posted in News.
The number seven just got a whole lot luckier if you ask me. Beta 7 was just released (download it now), and just when I thought no new exciting features would be added to MT4 because honestly, we really are trying to release this sucker, our developers start pulling rabbits out of their hats…Following a lively discussion on ProNet, Brad and Antoine teamed up to deliver to Movable Type for the first time: fully integrated, out-of-the-box podcasting support. Yep, no plugin required. Here is a summary of the features they added to support podcasting:Introduced several new template tags which can be used in RSS and Atom feeds, as well as on the published blog side to reference assets that have been uploaded into a post, thereby allowing a user to:Upload an mp3 via the posting interface, and have that mp3 encoded as an enclosure in an Atom or RSS feed.Wrap an audio/video player around uploaded assets or files in the blog’s published HTML.Introduced several new file types including “Audio” and “Video.” This will allow users from within the application to filter by media or file types to see “All Audio Files” or “All Video Files”.No feature in Movable Type…
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July 17, 2007
Tags, Variables, and Templates, Oh My!
By Anil Dash.
As we’ve had an influx of new people looking into Movable Type 4.0 during the beta, either for the first time, or for the first time in years, one thing that keeps coming up is “the template tags look cool — but what can I do with them?” Things have been quiet around here as the team is super busy fixing bugs and getting closer to release candidates for MT 4.0, so it seemed like a good time to recap a little bit of the history of MT’s template tags and then cover what’s new and upcoming for template hackers. First, the basics. MT’s template tags were designed to be simple enough for anybody who knows HTML and CSS to be able to make a great looking blog or site, without knowing how to program. To enable that, all the basic template tags (which you can see on a site like MTTags.com) work like a simple mail merge program: You make your HTML (or XML, or whatever) page, and then substitute in MT’s template tags so the program can insert your blog data automatically. This works for any entry, archive, or page in the system, and is pretty easy to…
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July 11, 2007
Psst — iPhone Nerds…
By Anil Dash.
Got a shiny new iPhone? Got shiny new MT4 Beta? Well, every listing screen in MT4 has built-in feeds for things like managing your entries and comments, all you’ve got to do is look for the feed icon on the side of a listing page. You can even customize the display (“Only show me comments that are pending approval.”) and get a feed showing exactly the info you want.Then, subscribe to that feed in Apple’s .Mac Reader. Voila, you’re up to date on your blog, right from your iPhone. The best part — MT’s admin feeds aren’t just for comments. You can subscribe to all kinds of custom views:Subscribe to MT’s System Activity Log to see stuff like which of your users are logging into the systemFilter the Activity Log to show you just new user registrations, so you can see who signs up to comment on your blog every daySubscribe to a list of entries with “Draft” status in all of your blogs, to see what content you haven’t published yetGet a feed of every term your readers are searching for on your blog, to give you suggestions about topics for new postsMake a feed for every Page that’s…
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July 10, 2007
Beta 6, replying to your commenters, more spam fighting ammo
By Byrne Reese and posted in News.
We are pleased to announce that we just released the sixth beta for Movable Type 4.0. Our focus in this release was almost entirely upon fixing bugs, reproducing issues reported by customers, responding to your feedback and bringing even more polish to the application. We tackled a lot of issues this week, but Beta Testers: we still want to hear from you! Did we finally fix that bug you reported or that was nagging you? Or is there still something that vexes you about the product that we still haven’t addressed? Please, leave a comment and let us know.So, while there are no new big features we can surprise you with in this beta, perhaps this is a good opportunity to highlight five features you may not have known about:Reply to Comment - users can now reply to comments posted by the readers directly from within the application. In other words, authors no longer need to switch back and forth between the application and their published blog to approve and then reply to comments left by their community.Captchas for Anonymous Commenters - Movable Type 4.0 allows users to authenticate in a variety of ways before leaving a comment, but many…
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July 7, 2007
Take A Look Around!
By Anil Dash.
Now that we’ve got the new site mostly up and running, it’s time to point out a few highlights you might want to check out if you’re new to exploring MT4.The good stuff: The free download of MT4 Beta 5, screenshots of the new version and an index of our screencasts, in case you like movies.Find out What’s New, what stuff we’re still working on, and what changes we’ve just made. We’ve got the requisite FAQ, too.Too lazy busy to install MT4 all by yourself, but the screencasts aren’t enough? Check out Time To Give It A Try for info on free demo installs and an Amazon EC2 image, all created by our community.If you’re the RTFM type, we’ve got documentation and the all-important Getting Started guide. If you’re upgrading from an older version of MT, you’ll want to check out Works with MT4 to make sure your stuff… works with MT4.And last but not least, send us your feedback! We can’t wait to hear what you have to say.While you’re thinking about it, you might want to subscribe to our feed. As we gear up for the official launch, there’s going to be more and more information popping up…
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July 5, 2007
Pardon Our Dust
By Byrne Reese.
We are about to begin the process of rolling out a new design for this web site and blog today. During the time some links or pages may appear broken or unstyled. We thank you for your patience. When we are finished we will update this post with further details.Update (3:32PM PST) - design update is almost done. We still have a few more things we are chasing down, but by all means, leave us your feedback and tell us what you think!…
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July 3, 2007
Happy Fourth of July!
By Byrne Reese and posted in News.
Obligatory Fireworks Photo As we all must do when we see fireworks, let us let out a collective “oooooooohhh” and “aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh” with the release of Movable Type 4.0 Beta 5. This release is right on par with our past releases, with over 100 fixed bugs, UI tweaks and feature enhancements. We have updated our change log and our list of known issues (some of you may have noticed that we did not update our known issues after the last beta - for that we apologize).This release does not have very many new features as the team is focusing 99% of its time on fixing bugs and refining the last pages of the application. There is one new feature worth mentioning however… the template editor now supports template snippets allowing users to easily insert template tags using handy keyboard shortcuts. This greatly speeds up the time it takes to code new templates and reduces the potential for error when typing template tags manually. Kudos to the team for squeaking this feature in there.We hope everyone in the Movable Type community has a Happy Fourth of July. Just know, that no one will judge you if your idea of fun on a…
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July 3, 2007
What I Screencast Is What You Get
By Byrne Reese and posted in Screencasts.
In the next installment of our on-going series of screencasts that showcase Movable Type 4.0 we decided to present an overview of what is perhaps the single most important screen in the application: the Compose Screen. In this quick four minute walk-through, we demonstrate the many new features found here:A built-in Rich Text (WYSIWYG) EditorAuto Save and post recoveryAbility to browse a library of previously uploaded images to insert them into a postAbility to upload images directly into a postA personalizable display of compose screenFully integrated tags support and tag auto-completionA suped-up category selection controlPost scheduling using a handy calendar pop-up One feature that was not demonstrated was the ability to use the Text Editor buttons like bold, italics, underline for your posts formatted in Markdown, Textile and Smartpants, three markup languages that Movable Type now supports natively….
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July 2, 2007
First Movable Type 4 Plugin released
By Byrne Reese and posted in Plugins.
This weekend, Kevin Shay, the developer behind several of Movable Type’s most popular plugins, release the first Movable Type 4 plugin. Some credit should go to Arvind as well who has been working on upgrading Custom Fields to work with MT4, but Kevin’s plugin represents a truly original MT4 idea. Bookmarks is a plugin that allows users to maintain a list of bookmarks to any page in the application. The list is easily accessed through a “Bookmarks” menu, which is used for managing and adding items to the list as well. In addition, each user can maintain their own set of unique bookmarks, turning Movable Type into a much more personalizable application. Major kudos to Kevin Shay. Now we need to launch our new plugin directory so that plugins like Kevin’s and Arvind’s have an equally awesome home to be listed and promoted….
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June 28, 2007
Our Community is a feature
By Byrne Reese.
One of the best things to come out of the Movable Type 4 beta, aside from the product itself, are the people and the community that has been given a breath of fresh air. Our users are excited again, and we see more and more people choosing Movable Type 4 for their blogging solution everyday. We have always considered our community as one of our greatest assets, but because our community is a reason people choose Movable Type we felt it important to highlight our growing community and the new community resources in our on going series of “What’s New in Movable Type 4.0.” So picking up where we left off, here are the next set of new features you will find in MT4: Create plugins without programming — plain-text configuration files make it easier than ever to customize MT to your needs The world’s largest single audience of shared templates and themes — the ability to reuse themes and templates from LiveJournal, Vox, and TypePad lets MT developers create themes that work on over 15 million blogs, with support for the same styles in Habari and Drupal A fully open-source GPL version of Movable Type Powerful solution packs —…
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June 27, 2007
Beta 4 and things still to come
By Byrne Reese and posted in News.
Last night we released the fourth Beta of Movable Type 4.0. This latest release continues to elevate the stability of the application by fixing more then 60 bugs, and brings us all one step closer to a release. Here are some highlights from the release:More refinements are made to the system level navigation scheme and to the primary navigation of the application.The template editor now sports template syntax highlighting.An <MTAuthors> template tag was added to allow for the listing of authors in the systemAn <MTIfCommenterIsAuthor> template tag was added to determine if a the current commenter in context is an author in the system, and a <MTIfCommenterIsEntryAuthor> tag was added to see if the current commenter is also the author of the current entry in context. These two tags allow for comments left by authors to be styled differently then other commenters.Turning on and off captchas is now controlled on a blog-by-blog basis - it is no longer a system preference, making it easier to craft the anti-spam policy of your choosing.The team is now beginning to shift gears in their development by focusing increasingly on fixing bugs and less and less on new feature development. But don’t despair! That…
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June 26, 2007
The Most Powerful Management Tools Available
By Byrne Reese.
When we first started the development process for Movable Type 4 we identified each of the primary users of Movable Type and profiled each of them to better understand how these authors, publishers, designers and developers all use Movable Type during the course of their day. We then started analyzing how the application could be more tailored to their individual needs. One of the users we took special notice of was the administrator. Whether that person is a dedicated IT professional with little interest in blogging, or whether the author, publisher, designer, developer and administrator are all the same person, we wanted to make the process of managing, monitoring and maintaining the application easier then ever before. So, in our on-going series of looking at all the new features we are pouring into Movable Type we look at the sometimes unglamorous list of administrative features new to MT4. A dramatically improved installation experienceCross-blog management of entries, authors, comments, and communityCustomizable, filterable RSS feeds for every management and listing screen in the applicationBuilt-in diagnostic tools for system configuration information and troubleshootingBlog cloning — with one click, you can create a new blog that inherits the styles, settings, templates, and configuration of…
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June 25, 2007
I am not an Enterprise.
By Anil Dash.
One of the biggest concerns a lot of folks in the MT community have is, “Is Movable Type for me?” It’s been easy to be confused — MT has been available in versions for developers, individual bloggers, businesses, educational users, and enterprises. With MT4, we wanted to make things a little bit more sane, so that all of those audiences could be benefiting from each others’ efforts and ideas, instead of feeling like the grass was greener on the other side.From a technological standpoint, this was pretty straightfoward; MT4 is built on a single core platform for every kind of user, with “packs” of feature functionality layered on top to make the different versions have distinct features. This makes it really easy to have shared features make their way out to everyone at the same time.For example, MT Enterprise got the built-in ability to clone blogs in your system last year, but we hadn’t done a major feature release of non-enterprise MT since then, so the feature hadn’t found its way out to regular users yet. We hated the idea that something that cool was limited to only one of our audiences, and not for any technical reasons, but just…
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June 22, 2007
Subscribe to our new comments feed
By Byrne Reese.
As you can see movabletype.org has been getting its fair share of comments and community participants recently. Its just so good to see users as engaged as they have been. And it is so a good feeling logging into Movable Type and seeing our dashboard light up with so many comments. To make it easier for community members to track these conversations, we have began publishing a comments feed for movabletype.org that anyone can subscribe to….
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June 22, 2007
Turning Readers into Members and Audiences into Communities
By Byrne Reese.
As bloggers and blogging in general have been maturing we have been witnessing a shift in the types of things people expect and need in their tool-set. That is why an important part of this release has been building a platform that helps bloggers and site owners to manage and promote a more active and engaged audience and community.In our ongoing series of “What’s New in Movable Type 4” we showcase the next set of features that help people build real community sites.OpenID support built inBuilt-in user registrationPowerful profile pages for every user in your systemCustomizable roles and even more granular user permissions let you control exactly what users can accessA ratings framework that lets users rate any item in the system — entries, comments, and in the future even authors or entire blogsEasily reply to comments from right within the administration UIBuilt in per-author archives let your readers connect with the people who publish the siteAutomatically provision a new blog for each user who registers with the systemBuilt-in support for integrated spam fighting and optionally displaying a CAPTCHA for commentsIntegrated email notifications — let your readers know when a thread they’re interested in has updated…
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June 21, 2007
Known issues list updated for beta 3
By Chris Ernest Hall.
Just a quick note to say that I updated the known issues list with some of the most egregious or frequently reported bugs in beta 3. So if you stumble across one of these bugs, it’s not necessary to report it as they should all be fixed for the next beta (except 53121 which may wait for the category selector redesign.)…
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June 20, 2007
Lists are great. Demos are better.
By Byrne Reese and posted in Screencasts.
So you have been following our list of new features in Movable Type 4, but you would rather us show you the new features. Well say no more.Our first screencast demonstrated just how easy it can be to install Movable Type. In this demo we showcase many of the new features found in MT4’s template editing interface. Observe template debugging enhancements, syntax highlighting and more first hand in this short 4 minute video….
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June 20, 2007
10 Features that Help Make You a Better Blogger and Publisher
By Byrne Reese.
Yesterday we started to list in greater detail all of the new features users will find in Movable Type 4.0. Today, we pick up where we left off and explore ten more features we introduced to help make Movable Type a more powerful publishing platform, while adding feature to make Movable Type easier to use then ever before. A powerful and simple re-sizable WYSIWYG Editor, with automatic saving of drafts of entries and templates — never lose a half-written post again Built-in cross-blog aggregation: Publish pages that include data from some, all, or just one of your blogs The world’s smartest template language, with boolean logic for choosing which content to display. (“Show me posts by ‘Jane’ in the category ‘music’ with tags ‘bass NOT fish’.”) Live preview shows you your entry before you publish, with full fidelity to your live blog Smart controls like auto-complete for tags, a calendar selector for scheduling future-dated entries, and a completely redone UI for selecting and creating categories Support for publishing standalone pages that automatically use blog templates and designs Better plain-text entry with built-in support for Markdown and Textile, and conversion of MS Word “smart” quotes to HTML entities Even more SEO-friendly…
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June 20, 2007
Beta 3 is out (and there was much rejoicing)
By Byrne Reese.
Last night we released the latest update to the Movable Type 4.0 beta. It was our third beta release and it contains well over 50 bug fixes as well as a number of new features worth checking out. Here a quick overview of some of the new features found in MT4 Beta 3:New welcome message for new users - to help new users get started more quickly and more easily then ever beforeA fully customizable dashboard - add and remove widgets that are most useful to you, and developers, build your own widgets to share with friends and the communityFully integrated Style Catcher support - easily change the look and feel of you blog (don’t worry, we will have a lot more new and modern themes for MT before we release!Remember our Betas are completely free, as will the product be when it is released, download it now. And most importantly, we want to hear your feedback. Tell us what you think about Beta 3. Your feedback has a real and meaningful impact on what we are doing. Send us feedback or write a blog post and send a TrackBack to this entry….
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June 19, 2007
What’s New in Movable Type 4?
By Byrne Reese.
Since the beta began, movabletype.org has been keeping the community up to date on new features as they have been developed. These features have come in direct response to feedback we have been receiving from you. Of course, believe it or not, this entire release is about building a product based upon the feedback we have received from our users and customers over the past several months and indeed years.As a result we have packed Movable Type 4.0 chock-full of new features. There are honestly too many to list in a single blog post - and as exciting as a long list of new features might be, we fear users’ eyes might start glazing over trying to parse through it all. So over the course of the next five days we will posting the entire list of the major new features found in Movable Type 4.0. Your first set? How Movable Type 4.0 is helping you to “understand your blogs better.”Understanding Your Blogs BetterA completely reinvented user interfaceBuilt in reports on blog activityBlog-style presentation of your recent content makes it easy to skim and know at a glance how your blogs are doingCustomize your reports and user interface using the…
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June 16, 2007
MT4 on EC2
By Byrne Reese.
In yet another very exciting development coming from the re-invigorated Movable Type community, Tim Appnel of Appnel Solutions and Blogcast, has put together a Movable Type 4.0 Image on Amazon’s EC2 Service (Elastic Compute Cloud).For those of you who are unfamiliar with EC2, it is a Web service offered by Amazon that allows users to create virtual machines on the Internet quickly and easily. Need a Fedora Server? Click, done. Need a Ubuntu machine? Click, done. And now: need a machine running Movable Type 4? Click, done.It really is that simple. It’s kinda scary. Amazon is simply doing some amazing stuff in the arena of Web services, from EC2 to S3. And they are real. Smug Mug, for example, detailed exactly how they were migrating all of photos to use Amazon’s S3 storage solution and it saved themselves millions of dollars in the process. I know Tim has used EC2 to setup obscure testing environments for software he was developing, and I use their web services to maintain a back up of all my personal photos and to power Media Manager. I have read a lot of blog posts from around the Interweb from people speculating on who the “next…
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June 14, 2007
Holy Syntax Highlighting Batman!
By Byrne Reese.
Last week we showed you a sneak peak of a feature we added to MT4 to make debugging templates easier and faster. Arvind responded with his usual enthusiasm:”This is a fantastic feature, it will prove to be very useful indeed :) Great work team (though a feature request, those line numbers in the error messages would be even more useful if the textarea had line numbers down the side.”Your wish Arvind, is our command. In Beta 3 (updated: the next possible beta) not only will we give you your precious line numbers, we will give you full syntax highlighting, compliments of David Davis and CodePress. Can you say “hawt?!” We can. Oh. Yes. We. Can….
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June 14, 2007
A community demo of MT4
By Anil Dash.
Mihai Bocsaru, a long-time ProNet member and all around MT enthusiast has been doing a great job of running a public demo of MT4, which he’s updated for the release of Beta 2. You can check out his demo site or log right in to MT4 Beta 2 with username “demo” and password “demo”. Now, please note: This isn’t an official demo site, this is just something Mihai’s done to support the community. So be nice to the demo! But if you haven’t had a chance to install the new version yourself yet and just want to see the shiny new goodies, you’re all set. Thanks, Mihai!…
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June 13, 2007
How your feedback is helping to shape Movable Type
By Byrne Reese.
Many users have taken the time to send us feedback about Movable Type 4.0. Users are sending us email directly, they are submitting feedback through our web form, members of ProNet are talking tirelessly on the mailing list and comments can be found all over movabletype.org from users that have a concern, a bug, an idea, or just an opinion.The amount of feedback is overwhelming — but in a good way, because the feedback really helps us to understand not what we think is important to our users, but what actually is important to our users. A good illustration of this can be found in Movable Type’s new information architecture introduced in the most recent beta: Beta 2.The IA of Movable Type is something we have been revising and refining constantly since the moment we first started working on MT4 because we feel that it has the greatest impact on usability of the application then any other feature. But at some point we knew we had to stop developing the IA in a vacuum and listen to what our users had to say. It wasn’t long after releasing Beta 1 that users began telling us that they loved the direction…
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June 12, 2007
Movable Type 4.0 Beta 2 Available for Download
By Byrne Reese.
We just this second made the new builds available for download. We have yet to publish the release notes or change log for this release—look for that later tonight. We will also be updating the list of known issues and removing comments related to issues that have been fixed.Update: The change log for the release is now available. Update: The list of known issues for this release is now available….
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June 11, 2007
The Rebirth of a Community
By Byrne Reese.
One unanticipated by-product of the release of the Movable Type 4.0 Beta was how quickly the community is being reinvigorated. Every day I am reading more and more in the blogosphere about Movable Type, and more and more frequently I am seeing new projects emerge from the community that are dramatically enhancing every user’s experience with the product. As a Product Manager, nothing fills me with more pride then seeing a user base so excited for their product. The latest project is MT Tags, a website created by the community to help catalog and document Movable Type’s extensive templating language. Going forward, I see this site serving as the basis for MT4’s template tag documentation. Also, because it is built using Movable Type, users will be able to leave comments and notes regarding template tags documented on the site; thereby helping other users with questions or difficulties they might be having.I can’t wait to see what the community has in store next……
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June 11, 2007
Making template errors not suck so much
By Byrne Reese.
So one week ago today we released the first Beta for Movable Type 4.0. It was very well received, and I must admit the more and more I use the new version the harder and harder I find it to use Movable Type 3.x. The difference between the two is that dramatic. If you are a Mac user the closest thing I can compare it to is the feeling you get when use Max OS 9 after having used OS X for a while. There are simply so many improvements each and every day; and I am not just talking about bug fixes either. Being a “real beta” we are using this time to not just to ferret out bugs, but also to listen to our users in an ongoing effort to make Movable Type 4.0 the best blogging platform on the planet. Bar none.For instance, one feature we didn’t initially plan on implementing was a way to capture, display and handle template errors more gracefully. We all get them - it is inevitable: you mistype a template tag name, or forget a closing tag somewhere, or who-knows-what. So it wasn’t long before we found the existing approach in…
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June 9, 2007
Coming soon to a Beta near you!
By Byrne Reese.
Every time I think Movable Type couldn’t get any better, I update to the most recent development version of MT4 and I see all of the latest enhancements. Most of the time I can predict what those will be; as the Product Manager of Movable Type I have a pretty good idea of what everyone is working on.But then sometimes one of the engineers will throw a curve ball. Like today, when I saw that Brad Choate, MT’s lead engineer, created an honest-to-god real live preview feature for entries you are editing. Yep, you heard me.So now, when you click the “Preview” button from the entry editing screen, you will get to see what your post will actually look like on your blog. Awesome.The feature was never scoped for 4.0. It was actually specifically scoped out of the release because of time constraints. In fact, I remember the day I crossed it off the 4.0 feature list, saying quietly to myself, “one day my dear feature, one day you will find a home… but not today.” And then I shed a tear.When I talked to Brad about this sneaking in, he said, “I just could let another release of MT…
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June 8, 2007
Stubbing out MT4’s Developer Documentation
By Byrne Reese.
Given that this a public beta and we are allowing the public witness and contribute to the process of refining our product right out in the open, I thought I should do the same with our documentation. So I published what information and documentation I have been able to piece together about the new Movable Type API and Registry. I am still working on it, but that should not keep me from sharing what I have. Right?As you can see, the Registry Reference could use some polish, and I was wondering if anyone in the community would like to help me out in cleaning it up. I will still work on fleshing out the content, but if someone could help create a table of contents, perhaps alphabetize the various sections, and even clean up some of the HTML, the extra help would go a long way to making these docs more usable and accessible to everyone.It doesn’t hurt to ask right?…
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June 8, 2007
CAN I HAZ DOCS?
By Byrne Reese.
One of the things that I hope is evident with this release of Movable Type is that we are taking a fresh look at everything. Naturally that includes the application itself, but it also encompasses everything around the application - from the web site that serves its community, to the licensing to help developers and users. It even means that our documentation is getting a fresh start too.Of course like the application, all of these resources are also in “beta.” This website for example will sport a different look in a couple weeks and our documentation is slowly being added to this website as well. You willl notice that comments are turned on for all documentation pages, and your feedback is always welcome. Right now we have our handy Getting Started Guide, an introduction to MT4’s Template Tags and now a guide on configuring Apache….
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June 8, 2007
Movable Type 4 Desktop Wallpaper
By Byrne Reese.
Things are really hopp’n over here. It is fantastic. So, following our posting of the Movable Type Installation Demo and Screencast we have had a number of people ask for the desktop wallpaper seen in the demo. The wallpaper was created by Jesse Gardner of Plastic Mind, a designer whose work you can find all over the Interweb. Plus, he has been a long time contributor to the Movable Type community - so a big shout out to him.You can get your MT4 wallpaper below, or you can download some “Classic MT” wallpaper from Movable Tweak. 800x6001024x7681280x10241680x1050…
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June 7, 2007
“Can’t upgrade that kind of scalar” errors during installation [updated]
By Chris Ernest Hall.
We’ve had many reports of the following error during installation: Can’t upgrade that kind of scalar at lib/MT/App/Upgrader.pm line 153.If you’ve been blocked from installation by this error we’d like to hear from since we are gathering data on the issue. When reporting the bug it would be very helpful for us to know:* Platform OS (Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, etc.)* Database you are using and version (MySQL 4.1 for example)* Whether your server/hosting provider are running any technologies such as FastCGI or cgiwrap. * And, as always, a link to your mt-check.cgi (or a copy and paste to email) are very, very helpful. And, of course, if you have encountered this bug, please accept our apologies—we know how annoying it is to get psyched about a new piece of software and then not be able to try it out. Update: Brad Choate has now checked in a fix for the issue, which I have verified. If you have experienced this bug and would like to try out the fix, please get in touch with me via the feedback form and I will make it available to you….
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June 7, 2007
“This is a real-ass beta!”
By Anil Dash.
The quote above was from someone in the community I had the chance to talk to in the days since we launched the MT4 beta. Let me tell you what it means, and why that blogger was exactly right.Mike at Mule Design, who’s helped a lot with the new look and user experience of MT4, put it a little more politely, calling it “The Return of Real Betas”, but that sounded a little bit too much like “We’re bringing Beta back”, and that’s very Summer of 2006, not very appropriate for a brand-new app.Here’s what a real beta means:You will find Actual Bugs. You may even hose your blog! Trust us, seriously. Bugs.You will actually have a chance to contribute ideas, suggestions, and fixes. We’re not pulling a “here, we’re almost done, but we wanted to start promoting it now”-style beta.Someday (soon!) the beta testing period will end. We love our friends at Google, but their worst innovation is plastering “Beta” on stuff for a few years until they get around to actually shipping. Don’t fret, after the beta, guess what — we’ll start working on the next version!We will honestly be listening to feedback. The beta isn’t limited to…
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June 7, 2007
MT4 beta 1 known issues update
By Chris Ernest Hall.
Hi, folks. First off, let me thank everyone who’s taken the time to download (or try to download) the first beta of Movable Type 4. We really appreciate your help, and apologize to those who had difficulties either downloading the packages or installing the beta. All that being said, here is a run-down of the top issues that you guys have been reporting so far:* “Failed to create stats file” errors in activity log. If you see this error, you should create a support directory in mt-static and make it writable by MT. If you keep your mt-static directory somewhere other than the directory where the MT cgi’s live, then you will need to set StaticFilePath in your mt-config.cgi appropriately. We will handle this situation better in the next beta—apologies for the inconvenience. * Comments listing screen is broken (“Can’t locate object method “load” via package “MT::Entry” at lib/MT/App/CMS.pm line 9524” error)* Deleting blog causes error (“Can’t use string (“MT::Asset”) as a HASH ref while “strict refs” in use at lib/MT/Object.pm line 798”)* StyleCatcher is broken.* Tag searching on blog is broken.If you do stumble across one or more of these issues, rest assured that we know about them and…
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June 6, 2007
Now a Major Motion Picture
By Byrne Reese and posted in Screencasts.
We have written a lot about the new Movable Type installation process, but honestly, who reads press releases and the ramblings of Anil anyways? So we thought it easier simply to show you our installation process. The movie is about 7 minutes long because we wanted to say hello at the beginning and end, and give users a tour of the new movabletype.org website. The installation process itself, as you will see, actually takes less then 5 minutes….
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June 6, 2007
Get your Movable Type 4 Badges
By Byrne Reese.
We are pleased to see that the initial reception for the Movable Type 4 has been very positive. We are even happier to see more and more people already making the switch to Movable Type or upgrading their existing Movable Type blog so early in the beta process. For all those people, we have created some special badges just for you, to help you show off your new or newly upgrading blog:…
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June 4, 2007
Welcome to the new movabletype.org
By Byrne Reese.
Welcome to the new movabletype.org, the ever-evolving community site and hub for the Movable Type user, developer, designer and professional. Movabletype.org (powered by MT4) is also the home and source of the most-up-to-date information on builds and source code for the Movable Type 4 Beta.Since you’re probably here for the key facts, let’s jump right in with the links you need:Learn more about Movable Type 4Read our extensive list of Questions and Answers about Movable Type 4Download the Movable Type 4 BetaLearn more about the Movable Type Open Source ProjectNow that you have those links, we thought we’d take this opportunity to talk a little bit about how the beta will work. In the olden days a “beta” referred to a time period that allowed users to test and evaluate software before it was released generally to customers. To quote the all-knowing Wikipedia: “A beta version is the first version released outside the organization or community that develops the software, for the purpose of evaluation or real-world black/grey-box testing.” So, what does this mean for you? It means that because this is the Movable Type 4 beta, you should expect to encounter bugs and issues, and you shouldn’t use Movable…
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