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June 2008

June 23, 2008

Turning Movable Type into a light weight desktop blogging client

By Byrne Reese and posted in Just for Fun.

Apple fans will love one of the latest tips from our community: how to turn your Movable Type blog into a seamless extension of your OS X desktop and operating system. In the first article Jesse Gardner explains how one can combine two technologies to create an awesome desktop blogging application: Movable Type and Fluid. Fluid makes it possible to turn any online application into a desktop app. Its free and dead-simple to use. Jesse and others use it for example to put GMail, Basecamp, Google Calendar, Flickr, Facebook and many other online applications right into their OS X dock. What makes Movable Type and Fluid work especially well together is the iMT plugin, which provides a beautifully designed user interface specifically for iPhone users. Coupled with Fluid’s ability to let any application it bootstraps to masquerade as an iPhone, Fluid can be used to bring all the benefits of the dramatically simplified iPhone user interface of the iMT plugin right to your desktop. And because iMT conforms to Apple’s own interface conventions and aesthetics, your Movable Type desktop client could not feel like a more natural extension of your Mac OS X environment….

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June 20, 2008

Movable Type Security Update for 4.0 and 4.1

By Byrne Reese and posted in Security.

Cross posted from the announcement found at the Official Movable Type News blog: Today we are releasing Movable Type 4.01b and Movable Type 4.12. These are free mandatory security updates for all Movable Type 4.x users. These updates resolve a vulnerability which has not been exploited, but was reported to us by a third party on June 16. We have addressed the issue with these updates, and are providing new, fully-tested versions for all affected versions of Movable Type in all supported configurations. A detailed description of the vulnerability can be found below, but in short a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability has been found in Movable Type’s built-in search feature, which could be exploited by malicious parties to execute javascript without permission. We have no record of a user having been affected by this vulnerability, and there are no known public exploits. The release candidates of Movable Type 4.2, currently in testing, Movable Type 3.36 and Movable Type Enterprise 1.5 are all unaffected by this issue. Here’s the Update Advisor, which summarizes the issues found and provides a guide for updating your installation of Movable Type. Movable Type Update Advisor: Version 4.01b and 4.12: Release Type: Security Release. The potential…

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June 12, 2008

More Reasons to Upgrade to Movable Type 4.2 and RC2

By Byrne Reese and posted in News.

Yesterday we release Movable Type 4.2 Release Candidate 2. This was an important milestone because this is the first release of MT 4.2 that our internal QA teams have fully certified to work against postgres. Release Candidate 2 also contains a number of important bug fixes and brings us one step closer to a full-fledged release. Just by upgrading from Movable Type 4.2 from 4.1, and doing nothing else, we have seen performance increases of 33% while publishing. However it is possible to optimize your Movable Type installation even further by taking advantage of a number of the performance optimization and tuning tools built right into the product. To help our users understand how to best take advantage of these features and to obtain performance increases 45% and higher we have published a Movable Type 4.2 Upgrade Guide to the community wiki. When MT 4.2 is officially released, this guide will be incorporated into our official documentation, but for now we are seeking help from the community to review, refine and make it better. In the meantime, allow me to give you a number of new reasons you may not have heard about to upgrade to Movable Type 4.2: PostOffice…

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June 3, 2008

Survey: How do you have Movable Type configured?

By Byrne Reese.

Since the day we released Movable Type Open Source, the software has been downloaded thousands of times per day. Wow, that is a lot of people trying Movable Type out, and because MT supports multiple environments and multiple databases like MySQL, Postgres, SQLite, Microsoft SQLServer and Oracle, that is a lot of different ways in which Movable Type can be configured once it has left our showroom floor. Having this information however is very important to us because it helps us to better understand our users’ needs and to build a product that is optimized for the most common usage scenarios. Therefore, we have created a very simple, multiple-choice, anonymous survey that will help us collect this valuable information. So, if you have a moment, we would appreciate it if you could take the survey and help us understand how you use Movable Type!…

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