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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