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 a general relevance to anyone aspiring to build a blog and web site as large as Boing Boing, Seed Magazine, Huffington Post, the Gothamist network of blogs and many others. Specifically:
- Scalable Publishing Models - a guide to asynchronous and background publishing in Movable Type 4.
- Movable Type System Architecture Guide - a document describing the various ways one could architect Movable Type in a multi-server environment.
Then in this week's Weekly Six Apart Hackathon engineers built several plugins that user have been asking for:
- Template Hammer - in response to many novice users' concerns about the complexity of Movable Type's default templates, Brad Choate created Template Hammer, a plugin that will flatten your templates eliminating all the various includes and creating a simple and consolidated set of templates that are larger in size, but for some much easier to understand.
- Ghostwriter - Beau Smith, the interface engineer behind MT4, and now a burgeoning plugin developer, created a plugin in direct response to what members of ProNet had been inquiring about: the ability to change the author of a page or entry from the compose screen.
With our first and last planned maintenance release behind us, almost all of Movable Type's most popular plugins updated to work with MT4 there has never been a better time to upgrade to Movable Type or try out Movable Type for the first time!
Bud on September 21, 2007, 7:27 p.m. Reply
I’ve not really able to participate in the community as much since teaching took off again in the fall, but I’ve really appreciated how you have kept up the pace of plug-in development. The plug-ins look really useful, particularly the hammer. I expect one would use it on top level templates. A screencast of that might be interesting.
moonpost on September 22, 2007, 8:50 a.m. Reply
Is there a recommended method for updating from 4.0 to 4.01 or just upload the whole archive in its entirety?
demonsurfer on September 22, 2007, 12:47 p.m. Reply
BIG thanks for speeding up the platform - responsiveness was really my only concern, but no longer! Cheers and excellent work, thank you all.
patrickbeeson.myopenid.com on September 24, 2007, 6:11 a.m. Reply
Since upgrading to MT 4.01 I’ve seen two major problems: a missing searchresults template from the system templates, and a non-working commentsresponse template also located in the system templates.
I managed to fix the search template by digging through my MT install, but it feels like a hack. I’ve been unable to address the comment_response template issue. That feature had to be turned off in my blog preferences.
If you’re going to prompt users to upgrade their blogs, please make sure it isn’t going to effect the look or functionality of their blogs first — or at least communicate this beforehand!
fibercement on July 21, 2008, 4:44 a.m. Reply
thanks a lot..
nemkayapi on August 27, 2009, 6:23 a.m. Reply
thank you very much
Janin Williams on August 30, 2012, 6:29 a.m. Reply
Moonpost when upgrading you need just to follow the instruction on your admin panel. That is all. They have made it incredibly easy.
Olga Stepanovska on September 4, 2012, 11:57 p.m. Reply
I recommend this one - Movable Type System Architecture Guide to everybody as a must read stuff if you want to know how to gain the maximum from the MT platform.
Joan on September 25, 2012, 8:17 p.m. Reply
Ghostwriter seems like a interesting plugin when you have a guest author. You can add some comments to his article and point that you are the commenter.
Kevin on November 14, 2012, 10:03 p.m. Reply
Indeed the iPhone plugin was the reason I became interested about Moveable Type. A friend of mine told me about it long ago and then gave me some tutorial sheets to learn from. I used Wordpress before that, but I can say I am more satisfied with Moveable Type now.
Serena T. on December 12, 2012, 9:18 p.m. Reply
Hello from a new user from Australia :) I am a bit confused about Movable Type and how to start it. Should I use this Template Hammer plugin now or the newest package includes everything necessary to start with.
Every help here would be really appreciate :)