July 23, 2008
Movable Type 4.2 RC4 and some of our latest hacks
By Byrne Reese and posted in News.
We have had some amazing feedback from the community since we started the public beta of Movable Type 4.2 - a release we consider to be one of the most important upgrades to Movable Type ever. Users of 4.2 can attest as well: Movable Type 4.2 is fast — never before have we seen performance increases of 100x for common tasks like search. Of course, improvements like that are only possible, I believe, when a team of people come together to stop using band-aids and focus intently on actually solving a problem in a fundamental way. Naturally with improvements like that in store for our users, the most common question we hear is, “when will Movable Type 4.2 be released?” With bug reports starting to wane and feedback slowing to a trickle, we think we are getting really close to a final release, and it is our belief that the latest, Release Candidate 4, will be the last release candidate prior to release. In the meantime, for those of you aching for something new, something cool, or something useful, here are some things coming out of our weekly hackathons that you might be check out: Template Set Exporter Tool Designers…
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July 22, 2008
Movable Type at OSCON 2008
By Byrne Reese and posted in Events.
Each year Six Apart sends a cadre of engineers to one of our favorite conferences: OSCON, O’Reilly’s Open Source Conference in Portland. We go because we love open source and because a large percentage of the people at the conference use and rely upon our open source technology to power their web sites and applications. This year is special, however. This is the year Movable Type will make its debut at the conference as an open source product. But we are not just there to celebrate this great Movable Type milestone, we are also there to celebrate the release of TypePad AntiSpam, a fully open source comment spam blocking service. TypePad AntiSpam sets itself apart because not only are its WordPress and Movable Type plugins open source, but the service is open source as well. Many of us will be on hand throughout the week to hang out and answer questions. Not only are we there to help you with any of our products, but we are happy to help you with any questions you have about open source in general, about how to best contribute to open source, and how to get your own projects started. We also there…
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July 3, 2008
Feeding Comments from your Friends to Movable Type
By chrishea and posted in Plugins.
As FriendFeed has increased in popularity throughout the blogosphere, many tech bloggers have started to express concern over how conversations are becoming fragmented. Taking a step back, FriendFeed is a social aggregator much like Facebook News Feed. It allows you to import your activity around the web (like Movable Type supports via the Action Streams plugin), chooses what to display to your friends, and allows rich conversations to emerge along with a simple “I like this” just like Vox has “[This is Good]”. While FriendFeed is great at encouraging new contributions by continually showing you active conversations, popular content your friends have created, and making it simple to contribute, these conversations don’t permeate their walls. FriendFeed isn’t trying to own these conversations — they do have a rich API — but comments that might have been posted on a Flickr photo, said on Twitter, or left on a blog post in the past are slowly occurring more frequently elsewhere. Last week, Mark Carey (a prominent member of the Movable Type Open Source community) released a plugin to help bridge these conversations. This plugin allows you to import all of the comments on one of your posts that readers have left…
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July 2, 2008
Quality is (still) a feature… Oh yeah, and so is speed
By Byrne Reese and posted in News.
Three years ago, at the same point in the life cycle of Movable Type 3, we took stock in what we had built, and turned our focus to product quality. That tradition continues today with Movable Type 4.2. Movable Type 4.2 is not a release of Movable Type narrowly focused on bringing more bells and whistles to the platform, but instead on making dramatic improvements to the fabric of the product in order to pave the way for more exciting things to come. And we are not just talking about performance, although that is a core focus of the release. We, learning from projects like Apple’s Snow Leopard, want this release to be about setting new standards of quality for the product. To that end, Movable Type 4.2 has been an opportunity for us and the community to make changes to our development and testing process so that going forward we can ensure an ongoing level of quality our customers and users expect and deserve. Here are just a couple of the things members of the team have been working on in effort to improve code quality: Mark Paschal, the creator of Action Streams, has been working on building the…
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