Not a developer? Go to MovableType.com

News

10 Features that Help Make You a Better Blogger and Publisher

By Byrne Reese
Posted June 20, 2007.

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.

  1. A powerful and simple re-sizable WYSIWYG Editor, with automatic saving of drafts of entries and templates -- never lose a half-written post again
  2. Built-in cross-blog aggregation: Publish pages that include data from some, all, or just one of your blogs
  3. 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'.")
  4. Live preview shows you your entry before you publish, with full fidelity to your live blog
  5. 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
  6. Support for publishing standalone pages that automatically use blog templates and designs
  7. Better plain-text entry with built-in support for Markdown and Textile, and conversion of MS Word "smart" quotes to HTML entities
  8. Even more SEO-friendly with customizable URLs per entry, per-template, or per-page
  9. A simple integrated IDE for templates, with smart error reporting for template typos
  10. Paginated archives -- easily walk your users through posts by date or author or category
Back

12 Comments

Sara

Sara on June 20, 2007, 1:14 p.m. Reply

About item 19:

Does that mean that we have “real” pagination of category archives and not just category by month?

Sara

Sara on June 20, 2007, 3:48 p.m. Reply

No problem Byrne.

Jay Allen

Jay Allen on June 22, 2007, 2:20 p.m. Reply

“The flaw in MTMultiBlog (and this setup, from what I can tell) is that scheduled posts do not trigger a rebuild of the aggregating page.”

Sounds like an an excellent candidate for a bug report, regardless of whether you’re doing something wrong or not.

Byrne, the feedback form is the appropriate place for bugs, is it not?

(Gee, I sure wish that nifty newly bundled Markdown plugin was in effect here in the comments…. Hint hint… :-)

Joan

Joan on July 12, 2012, 6:55 a.m. Reply

You have to add that the code is not everything. You need to have some writing skills. However, I don’t want to say that a good plugin is not going to help you, but without interesting writing nobody will stay on your blog.

Viola T.D.

Viola T.D. on August 1, 2012, 7:44 a.m. Reply

We have to add the most important thing. You need to be a good writer.

Robert Thomas

Robert Thomas on August 28, 2012, 1:15 a.m. Reply

Is it possible to change the title tag to be different than the headings?

Joe Robertson

Joe Robertson on September 18, 2012, 1:46 a.m. Reply

Hi, a newbie question here. How can I have SEO friendly url for template?

Delano

Delano on October 26, 2012, 4:56 a.m. Reply

I think that the most valuable change between Moveable Type 3 and 4th series is the WYSIWYG Editor. It boomed MT to the sky :)

Pete Corbon

Pete Corbon on November 14, 2012, 7:53 p.m. Reply

The customizable URLs are really great. I have the option to write a different title, a different URL, but can I also write a different title tag?

George Williamson

George Williamson on November 25, 2012, 3:24 p.m. Reply

These are interesting options and addons to Movable Type. My eyes caught number 17. I know that editable URL is really benefiting the SEO, but I don’t understand how could we use the template tags for better search engine optimization.

Barrie

Barrie on December 19, 2012, 2:26 a.m. Reply

Hi, can I ask how the function number eleven “Built-in cross-blog aggregation: Publish pages that include data from some, all, or just one of your blogs” is dealing with the duplicate content which is so let’s say it hate by the search engines?

Amanda Jones

Amanda Jones on December 21, 2012, 5:53 a.m. Reply

Hi, Barrie you need simply to add a Rel:Canonical to your code and everything will be just fine. Hope that helps :)

Byrne Reese

Byrne Reese was previously the Product Manager of Movable Type at Six Apart, where he had also held positions as the Manager of Platform Technology and Product Manager for TypePad. Byrne is a huge supporter of the Movable Type user and developer community. He dedicates much of his time to promoting and educating people about Movable Type as well as building the tools and plugins for Movable Type that are showcased on Majordojo. He contributes regularly to open source; and he is an advocate for open protocols and standards like Atom and OpenID.

Website: http://profile.typekey.com/byrnereese