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February 2008

February 25, 2008

Help Make MT Even More Bulletproof

By Byrne Reese and posted in News.

Some of the largest properties on the web power their sites using Movable Type. Not just the biggest blogs, but some of the biggest sites, period. You’ve seen ‘em: The Washington Post, The Gothamist, Boing Boing, The Huffington Post and thousands more. Each of these sites rely on Movable Type to keep their web sites and blogs up and running, and one of our most important goals for Movable Type is to make sure your MT-powered site stays bullet-proof and reliable, no matter how big traffic gets. There are a few different features and capabilities of Movable Type that make this kind of scale possible: Background publishing and task management - Movable Type can offload the work-intensive parts of publishing to a separate task system which handles the heavy lifting. Multiple supported and scalable system architectures - Movable Type can run across a number of servers, splitting tasks like comment management and publishing onto their own dedicated infrastructure. Static publishing - Movable Type’s has always defaulted to publishing completely static HTML pages, which serve up faster with less work needed by your web and database servers. And static pages are a lot more forgiving of transient problems with a database…

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February 8, 2008

Where Movable Type is Going in 2008

By Anil Dash and posted in News.

In case you missed it, you’ll want to check out Six Apart CEO Chris Alden’s post MT in 2008: Open, Powerful and Easy. It’s a great look at the vision for the MT platform going forward, and offers a compelling look at the philosophy behind the huge investment in MT over the past year:So, back in 2006, we made some decisions. First and foremost, we were going to compete. MT has brought more to blogging than any platform in history — it was the first professional grade blogging platform (when it launched) and the first enterprise grade blogging platform (with MT Enterprise) — but in 2006 it was time to double down or take the chips off the table.We decided to bet on the future.Central to this effort is Movable Type 4, a completely re-thought version of the software designed to address the way the web and social media have changed in the past half-decade. We wanted to improve the ease of use, the user interface, the installation process, and the content & community management capabilities. We also greatly enhanced our advanced capabilities, launching an Enterprise Solution, making MT unrivaled in its power for large customers who need to run large…

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February 7, 2008

Introducing the Movable Type Design Assistant

By Byrne Reese and posted in Tips & Tricks.

For years now, Movable Type has had a powerful “Style Catcher” built in, which lets you browse a number of different style libraries all over the Internet, and then apply a style to your blog with just a click. It’s really simple, but as a company that’s always cared a lot about design, we wanted to give you more power, more personalization, and more control over the way your site looks. So behold, the Movable Type Design Assistant, a beta of a new tool designed to help you make beautiful sites, easily. We started with a few of our most popular default styles, which cover a wide variety of visual looks, and which also offer a range of different choices for the number of columns of content you have on your site. But what if you like one of the default styles and just need to make a few tweaks to it here and there? Or what if you want to start from a clean slate, working with a completely unstyled blog and adding in your own look and feel? The Design Assistant makes that easy, too. Jim Ramsey, Movable Type’s lead designer and someone who’s done some great thinking…

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February 5, 2008

Website maintenance tonight

By Byrne Reese and posted in News.

Tonight, February 5th, at approximately 9:00pm PST the Movable Type [dot org] web site will be taken offline for routine maintenance and to expand the machine’s capacity. The outage should last for approximately 30 minutes. The following services will be unavailable during this time: The movabletype.org Web site Movable Type Documentation Movable Type Forums The Style Archive The Plugin Directory Learning Movable Type Access to MTOS nightly builds Access to MTOS stable builds We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience….

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