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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