August 25, 2008
FogBugz reorganization
By Chris Ernest Hall.
Just a quick note to say that now we have shipped MT 4.2, we are tweaking the way we organize the MT FogBugz instance. Since we launched the open-source project with MT 4.1, we’ve had two projects that have held current MT cases, MT Internal and MT Open Source. MT Internal corresponded to the packs and any other proprietary non-OS code, while the MTOS project held cases that involve the code that is GPL’ed. The MTOS project was visible to anyone with an account in fbz, while only Six Apart employees could see MT Internal.The problem with this approach was that there were some MTOS cases that shouldn’t have been public (because, for example, they might have a user’s email address or other sensitive information, or relate to security vulnerabilities that had not yet been publicly disclosed) There are also many cases that are MT Internal that non-Six Apart employees should be able to see, like bugs and patches that impact enterprise consultants and developers.Going forward, instead of MT Internal and MTOS, the MT fbz instance will instead have two projects, one public and one private, both of which can contain bugs in both the open source and proprietary portions…
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August 22, 2008
Connecting mixi Users with Movable Type Communities
By chrishea and posted in Plugins.
As we started to show with Movable Type Pro last week, blogging is evolving to encompass the world of social networking and connect to the rest of the web; merging publishing with community. Since the release of Movable Type 4.0 last year, we’ve built in native support for technologies like OpenID and now OAuth, to make it even easier for people to bring parts of their profile with them when they come to your blog. Last month we demoed integration of Facebook Connect with Movable Type which continues to make this vision a reality, though it isn’t enough to integrate with just one social network. mixi is Japan’s most popular social network (one in five Japanese web users use mixi) and earlier this week they launched support for OpenID. Six Apart’s Japan team participated in this launch and we are now shipping a plugin to make it easy for mixi users to interact with Movable Type powered communities. The mixiComment plugin brings the community of mixi to your site, giving commenters an even better experience by signing in using their mixi OpenID. Even better, the user interface takes advantage of new features in OpenID 2.0 so that normal people don’t…
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August 21, 2008
Important Update: Movable Type 4.21 now available
By Byrne Reese and posted in News.
In recent days two significant issues in the Movable Type 4.2 release were reported by our community. One of these bugs can potentially result in some form of limited data loss, and the other could cause loss of some configuration data in some circumstances. We have reproduced these issues as quickly as possible, and created patches to remedy the problems. Most users are not at any risk from these issues, but here are the circumstances under which you may have been affected: Custom fields data. If you are upgrading from Movable Type Commercial or Enterprise 4.1 to Movable Type Pro or Enterprise 4.2 and you are using custom fields on any object in Movable Type and there are more than 100 rows in the table for that object, some of your custom field data could be lost in the migration. Archive mappings. If you create a new blog on your Movable Type 4.2 installation and you delete an archive mapping from one of the archive templates, this action will remove the rest of your blog archive mappings inadvertently. Both of these issues have been fixed and verified by our quality assurance team. The fixes can be found in the newly…
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August 16, 2008
Creating Drop-Down Navigation with Movable Type
By Byrne Reese and posted in Tips & Tricks.
A common question from Movable Type users and designers is, “how do I create nice navigation for my web site?” The Professional Website template set and even Mid-Century have navigation build in. But there are Movable Type themes out there that don’t have this feature and users want to know how to add it. This brief tutorial will show you how. The Objective The goal of this tutorial is to demonstrate how to add category driven drop-down menus to your web site that approximates the look and feel below: What does this mean? Well, there are lots of ways to build navigation for a site. The method you will choose depends largely upon your content and implementation strategy. This methods are: category driven navigation - using category and sub-category names as the menu and menu item names page driven navigation - using page names as the menu and menu item names folder driven navigation - using a hierarchy of folders (folders contain pages) This article will focus on creating menus based upon your category hierarchy….
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August 16, 2008
Another hallmark design for Movable Type
By Byrne Reese and posted in Design.
A lot of Movable Type users are about to be given another great reason to upgrade to Movable Type 4.2: the release of the Mid-Century template set by Jim Ramsey. Jim also designed the Professional Website template set (formally known as the Universal Template Set), which is largely regarded as one of the best and most flexible packaged designs for Movable Type and also comes bundled with Movable Type Pro. Jim is setting a new standard for design on Movable Type, not just in aesthetics, but in functionality. This may go without saying, but Jim is someone who knows design, and he is tuned into what people want. Combine those two qualities as Jim does and just look at the amazing feature list he has assembled: AJAX Commenting Auto-highlighting comments from the author Javascript photo gallery widget Unique archive listing design Tag clouds And more… We are also happy to make this wonderful blog design available to the world for free under an open source license to encourage others to build and expand upon it. Download the Mid-Century Template Set now, and when you have it deployed let us know with a comment so we can see what you have…
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August 13, 2008
Movable Type Warm and Fuzzies
By Byrne Reese and posted in Community.
It has been less then 24 hours since we released Movable Type 4.2 and the feedback has been wonderful! I have been answering people’s questions about upgrading, installing and migrating to Movable Type 4.2 all day — its almost as if Movable Type and Movable Type Pro is the release everyone has been waiting for: “this just keeps getting better and better” and “I know I have not been a regular blogger for quite a while, but this new version really makes me anxious to get going again and become a more regular blogger. Who knew Movable Type could also help you with that kind of problem?” — Sara “My jaw is down there lost somewhere under the table… great work.” — dug “Just want to say WOW! The Pro license is great. Exactly what was needed for many like me, who has a commercial license, but not a business and needed more than 5 authors.” — Nicholas “6Aers, MT Team, and community contributors: thank you. This is great work all should be congratulated. But more important than that, this is a fun new toy to play with! Yay!” — Dan “I am pleased that MT Pro is being released…
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August 12, 2008
Movable Type 4.2 is here!
By Byrne Reese and posted in News.
Today is one of the most exciting days in the history of Movable Type. Our community’s hard work has yielded one of the most significant and important releases in Movable Type’s history: Movable Type 4.2. This new release is the fastest and most secure release of Movable Type ever. Plus it comes packed with new features that you’ve been asking for: Threaded comments An out-of-the-box solution for comment spam Live template previews Paginated search results and entry pagination for dynamically published blogs Redesigned template and widget management areas Simple, simple, simple templates for quick and easy site customization However, there is another reason though why we feel this is such a significant milestone for Movable Type and for all of us who manage communities online: Today, we introduce Movable Type Pro. Movable Type Pro is the convergence of three critical Movable Type capabilities: blogging, content management and social networking. Movable Type Pro is now the only integrated social publishing platform on the market today. MT Pro combines the power and flexibility of the open source core Movable Type with the rich content management capabilities of the Movable Type Professional Pack, and all the community features of the Movable Type Community…
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August 8, 2008
Movable Type 4.2 RC5 and Security Updates
By Byrne Reese and posted in Security.
We’ve mentioned it on the Movable Type product site, but we’re proud that MT has a history of being one of the most secure publishing platforms around. So a big part of our effort in creating Movable Type 4.2 has been around ensuring that it’s our most secure release ever. And along the way, we’ve made some changes that will even improve security for older versions of MT. Today we release Movable Type 4.2 Release Candidate 5, the last planned release candidate for this version of Movable Type before its final release, and the culmination of the largest security evaluation effort ever for our platform, and possibly for any installable blogging platform. The diligent work of our team, joined by community contributors around the world, has found a few areas where we’ve been able to make Movable Type even more secure. In the case of Movable Type 4.2, that means its forthcoming final release will be the most secure version of MT ever. In the case of earlier releases, it means we’ll be providing updates to remedy these potential security vulnerabilities. It’s important to note that there are no known exploits of these issues, but we’ve chosen to preemptively address…
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August 7, 2008
Collating and displaying content from multiple sources using Movable Type
By Byrne Reese and posted in Hacks.
Nick O’Neill just published a great screencast and howto about using a plugin few people know about: Mark Pasc’s Order plugin for Movable Type. Order is a plugin that allows one to build and merge a list of content from various sources and then to sort and display them in a single list together. What is especially powerful about the Order plugin is the ability to not only pull together content form multiple sources, but also the ability to collate content of wildly different structures and types. In Nick’s screencast he shows how he used this plugin on his own Movable Type-powered blog to interleave entries from two different blogs, as well as actions from Mark’s Action Stream plugin into a single list on his homepage. He even makes available the code he uses on his own blog so that others can easily replicate it. Order Screencast from nick o'neill on Vimeo….
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August 4, 2008
Website outage update
By Byrne Reese and posted in News.
On August 3rd around 11:30pm, the machine hosting a number of Movable Type web sites, including this one suffered a major hardware failure. We worked through the night and into the day in order to restore availability as quickly as possible. As of approximately 5:20 pm on August 4 we were able to fully restore the following web sites: www.movabletype.org plugins.movabletype.org forums.movabletype.org We will continue to work on fully restoring the following sites and services through the night: wiki.movabletype.org www.learningmovabletype.com www.thestylearchive.com www.thestylecontest.com Stay tuned to this blog post for additional updates throughout the night and into tomorrow as we bring our entire set of services back up to full availability….
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