Not a developer? Go to MovableType.com

News

A tour of Movable Type 4.1's asset editing functionality

By Byrne Reese
Posted December 31, 2007, 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.

Picture 2.png

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.

Picture 3.png

Asset Auditing

From the asset details screen you can view a list of all the pages and entries an asset is used. This makes is much easier for you to track down an asset if it needs to removed from a website, or updated site-wide. This view also shows all the permutations of the asset like the various thumbnails that have been generated for it.

Picture 4.png

Edit Assets

From the asset editing screen you can easily rename the asset, edit the description of the asset, or tag the asset to make to easier to find and re-use later.

Picture 5.png

Back

12 Comments

budgibson.myopenid.com

budgibson.myopenid.com on December 31, 2007, 2:52 p.m. Reply

I think your podcasting plugin could really move MT’s asset management capabilities forward, but it will need development. The reality is that most assets that you want to publish (photos, videos, audio, etc.) do not reside on your MT site. A nifty feature for your podcast plugin would be the ability to read Media RSS feeds and pull the asset information from there.

The predominant approach to media is to host it somewhere else and then to aggregate it various ways. Focus on improving MT’s ability to track and aggregate all of these disparate pieces of media content, and you’ve got a win.

Byrne Reese

Byrne Reese on December 31, 2007, 3:33 p.m. Reply

@Bud - that is exactly what the podcasting plugin does. Pointing it at a Media RSS feed is a great idea though. But you point it at an MP3 anywhere on the Internet, and the plugin will create the enclosures for it, wrap it in a flash media player etc. What is truly amazing about MT4 is its ability to allow you to manage remote assets as if they resided locally within your CMS. Take YouTube videos and Flickr photos as an example.

Thank you Bud. You keep lobbing me softballs like this and I will keep knocking them out of the ballpark.:)

Carlo

Carlo on January 1, 2008, 12:25 p.m. Reply

All of these new additions are amazing! But why not take them another step further and give users the stuff needed to have full control of their assets? That means being able to move assets to folders created with MT, filename changes, etc? Now that would be really useful (for me anyway :p)

Other that that all I can say is CONGRATS on all of the new features.. simple great!

budgibson.myopenid.com

budgibson.myopenid.com on January 7, 2008, 6:17 p.m. Reply

Byrne, my softballs are me dumbly attempting to understand :). I think I am finally figuring this out though.

Sara

Sara on January 11, 2008, 5:09 p.m. Reply

Hey when do we get an update to known issues/release notes for b3?

driftin

driftin on January 16, 2008, 5:27 p.m. Reply

Great stuff Byrne, i’m comparing different CMS’s at the moment to to develop a community kinda site for a faculty association. And a good assetmanager is one of the criteria! But another criteria is a XHTML (and a real one… not a crappy one that MT4 uses now) WYSIWYG editor. I’d like to use the TinyMCE one. Would i be able to integrate the asset manager into that editor you think?

gaingame

gaingame on November 11, 2010, 6:01 p.m. Reply

yeah,if applications can be made into movable type plugins,it wiil be much convenient.

Keith

Keith on July 12, 2012, 10:21 a.m. Reply

I’mstill using MT as a blog platform. I am bit afraid of using it as a CMS for huge websites even than I know the fifth series are good enough for that.

Ketty Brandon

Ketty Brandon on August 3, 2012, 8:47 p.m. Reply

Moveable type is a great CMS. You can use it instead both Wordpress and Joomla without any problems.

Halong Cruise

Halong Cruise on August 29, 2012, 7:04 p.m. Reply

this is one of the best version of movable type

French Gite

French Gite on October 1, 2012, 6:08 a.m. Reply

I have found MovableType to be the best CMS for inexperienced users. It’s simple and efficient features makes it user friendly and powerful. The results come very fast and it’s a pleasure to see your work paying off.

Daniel Burton

Daniel Burton on October 25, 2012, 3:12 a.m. Reply

Hi, from Botswana :) I am new in Moveable type and I am start learning, because I want to make a cool looking blog. However, I think it would be great if you make a much bigger tutorial with a demo version of the site, so we could understand the tricks more easily.

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