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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