December 31, 2007
A tour of Movable Type 4.1’s asset editing functionality
By Byrne Reese and posted in Tips & Tricks.
Movable Type 4.0 provided users for the first time with the features necessary for Movable Type to serve as a light weight content management system for web sites. It also provided a framework to developers to define their own custom asset types as illustrated through the Media Manager and Podcasting plugins for Movable Type. Movable Type 4.1, currently in beta, takes asset management one step further by allowing administrators and author to more easily edit, tag and organize the assets within their Movable Type install. What follows is a brief overview of some of these new features. Filter Assets by Type As you expand upon the types of assets you manage within Movable Type, you can easily filter them to see just your Flickr photos, or your YouTube videos, or your images or your podcasts… you get the idea. One Click Previews When viewing your list of assets, not only does Movable Type now show a small thumbnail of each asset, but you can zoom in on the asset without leaving the page by clicking the small magnifying glass associated with each asset. Asset Auditing From the asset details screen you can view a list of all the pages and…
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December 27, 2007
Integrating Movable Type with FogBugz
By Byrne Reese and posted in Plugins.
We were honored when FogCreek granted us a license to use FogBugz for public case tracking and project management for the Movable Type Open Source project, which is the largest deployment of FogBugz for an open source project. In an effort to repay their kindness, but also to help keep the community as up-to-date as possible on the latest known issues with the product, Chris Hall has implemented a new Movable Type plugin known as MT Fogger. It is a plugin that exposes within Movable Type a set of template tags making it possible to query and display search results from FogBugz within a web site or blog. If you didn’t know, Chris Hall is the man behind the curtain that responds personally to all of the feedback that comes into FogBugz via our feedback submission form. He is also the lead QA engineer for Movable Type (and MTOS) and the creator of MT Booter, a handy QA tool for generating test data for Movable Type….
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December 26, 2007
MTOS Subversion Tips
By Byrne Reese and posted in Tips & Tricks.
Developers looking to stay plugged into the bleeding edge of Movable Type without having to depend upon nightly builds may like the following tip which shows how one can always access the following builds reliably and predictably without having to worry about branches, tags or anything else about how the source code is organized: The last official release that one can download from our web site The last stable release, which includes minimally tested milestone beta builds The most recent source code in active development Pointers to each of these are maintained for your convenience by the development team. Simply execute the following command and you will check out three copies of Movable Type corresponding to each of the above states of the source code (the source code will be placed within a directory called mtos-latest): svn co http://code.sixapart.com/svn/movabletype/latest mtos-latest When that is complete you can navigate to the dev directory found within the mtos-latest directory that was just created for you and execute svn up to update to the most recent code in development. Executing the following command will reveal that this is made possible through a set of three svn:externals: svn propget svn:externals http://code.sixapart.com/svn/movabletype/latest In layman’s terms, these…
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December 24, 2007
MTOS Project Updates
By Byrne Reese and posted in News.
Last week we released Movable Type 4.1 Beta 2 which included a number of new features for the open source project as well, including: AtomPub Support - a core mission for MTOS is to support core Internet standards, which includes the Atom Publishing Protocol, or “AtomPub” for short. Revamped Asset Editing Interface - CMSWire recently wrote a piece entitled Movable Type 4.1 Goes Beyond Blogging - and they are right. But it is not just the commercial product that is headed in this direction. The open source project too is also becoming a more flexible tool for light weight content management — as is evidenced by Movable Type’s extensible asset management framework, and the work that Beau has been doing to expand upon the user experience around managing online assets. Virtually all of the changes in the last beta, including the ones listed above, can also be found in the latest MTOS builds. Speaking of which, if you are a person who enjoys living on the bleeding edge then the best resource for you is still our nightly builds, which ever since we completed our subversion migration to code.sixapart.com have become far more meaningful. Now that primary development of Movable…
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December 21, 2007
AtomPub Support and New Edit Asset screens: MT4.1 Beta 2 Released
By Byrne Reese and posted in News.
I can imagine that it is easy for some to skip over a blog post announcing the availability of a beta thinking “oh, they just fixed some bugs.” But to so with this most recent release of Movable Type would be a mistake. One of the things that makes Movable Type stand out as a product is an incredibly professional, yet agile development process that allows for constant innovation in additional to a steady improvement upon stability and quality, without putting our releases at risk. So while Movable Type 4.1 Beta 2 contains a huge number of bug fixes as it should being a beta, the development team still found time to include a some significant new features and advancements to the platform as a whole. Most notably: AtomPub Support - Atom is something Six Apart has been very involved in since it first emerged as potentially the first Internet standard for syndication over four years ago. We released one of the first implementations of the fledgling protocol over 4 years ago and we were also among the first to support the Atom syndication format when it emerged as an official standard across all of our products. And while Movable…
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December 13, 2007
Movable Type 4.1 Beta, and a new Reseller Program
By Anil Dash and posted in News.
This week’s launch of the Movable Type Open Source project was huge news for our community. But as part of that announcement, we promised even more news to come. So today, we’re introducing some of the next steps that will outline how we’re going to fueling that community in the coming weeks and months. We’re beginning the beta of Movable Type 4.1 today, with tons of new features. We’re announcing the Professional Pack, the first of the extended benefits that paid users of MT will be receiving. We’re launching the Movable Type reseller program designed to offer resellers a 30% discount that you can pass on to your customers or keep for yourself. Each of these announcements on its own would be big news, but one of the things we wanted to demonstrate was how much we value our paying customers who’ve supported MT’s development (the Professional Pack and MT 4.1 will be a free upgrade for all paying customers of MT 4.0), as well as how having an open platform will help benefit everyone who uses Movable Type. Enough talk — let’s show you what’s coming! What’s new in Movable Type 4.1? Here’s what you can look forward to…
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December 12, 2007
Movable Type Open Source
By Anil Dash.
As of today, and forever forward, Movable Type is open source. This means you can freely modify, redistribute, and use Movable Type for any purpose you choose. Just want the details and downloads? Skip to the bottom. But you might like the story of how we got here. Like many of us on the team, some of you have been waiting for this moment for years. For a business, an open source license affects boring things like how a product is created, updated, and distributed. But the open source movement has always been about something more important: Freedom. With a name like “Movable Type”, we’ve always been keenly aware of the importance of freedom, as that name echoes both the birth of the printing press and the creation of independent media that an individual can control. Our goal has always been to create the best blogging platform in the world and to put that power in the hands of as many people as possible. And we want to honor a tradition of openness that Movable Type has embodied for over six years: From TrackBack to Atom to OpenID, we’ve always invented and popularized key technologies that were delivered with open…
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December 4, 2007
Jim Ramsey on Designing for Flow
By Anil Dash.
Jim Ramsey, our lead designer on Movable Type (and the guy responsible for the gorgeous design of Movable Type.com), has just published Designing for Flow over at A List Apart. Jim eloquently describes the idea of “flow” in his essay:Flow, as a mental state, was first proposed by psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and is characterized by a distorted sense of time, a lack of self-consciousness, and complete engagement in the task at hand. Software engineers might feel it when they’re writing code, gamers might feel it when playing Guitar Hero III, Christopher Cross felt it when he went sailing. For designers, it’s exactly the feeling we hope to promote in the people who use our sites.We’ve been proud of the huge number of talented designers that have been members of the MT community from day one, and hope that talking through a little of our design process can inspire even more creative work from all of you….
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December 3, 2007
Appnel on Code
By Anil Dash.
Even though he got a shout-out in our last post, it’s worth giving some link love to Tim Appnel’s “On Code” blog again. He’s doing one of the best jobs of blogging regularly about the nuts and bolts of Movable Type, a topic he knows well as one of the longest-standing members of the most technical parts of the MT community. Over the past six (!) years, Tim’s done a great job of not just understanding and explaining functional details of Movable Type, but of building award-winning plugins and of holding our feet to the fire at Six Apart when he thinks it’s in the best interest of MT. It’s a thrill to see him posting frequently about MT with his uniquely informed perspective, and it’s well worth adding his site to your list of regular reads if you want to keep up with a strong independent voice in the MT community.And of course, if you value Tim’s insights into creating content and community with Movable Type, it’s worth finding out more about Appnel Solutions to help with consulting….
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