Obtaining total transparency into your publishing system

Movable Type has proven time and time again that it can help some of the Internet's most influential and most innovative blogs become some of the largest as well. Not every content management system is up to the task of publishing sites on this scale, but Movable Type is. One reason for that is that its publishing engine has tremendous flexibility in regards to how it can be deployed, allowing every site to fine tune its performance independently across as many machines as is necessary.

One critical component often used by these large sites is the "Movable Type Publishing Queue" - a simple publishing service to which the system can offload the task of keeping a web site up to date. This in turn dramatically increases performance, and improves the stability of the entire system by distributing much of the work a content management system must perform to a set of dedicated and distributed resources.

To give users the transparency and visibility into this critical system, we have begun work on a new plugin called Publish Queue Manager. This free and open source plugin provides its users with the following features:

• view a list of all the jobs in their publishing queue.
• see which jobs on the queue are currently being worked on.
• see if any of the jobs on the queue have produced an error.
• change the priority of any of the jobs on the queue.
• delete jobs off the queue.

Of course, not every Movable Type user has a need to use Publish Queue, but those that do have come to rely upon the benefits it provides a great deal, which is why this plugin can be so useful to those users. So how do you know if you should be using Publish Queue?

1. It seems to take Movable Type a long time to publish a single entry or new comment.

2. Your readers leave a lot of comments, or your site tends to get a lot of comments submitted all at once.

3. You utilize a lot of archive maps on your site, like Comment Feeds, Author Archives, Category Archives, Category-Monthly Archives, etc.

4. You have one template on your site, like a large Google Sitemap, or a large archive listing that by itself takes a long time to publish.

5. Your system is often publishing multiple comments or entries at the same time.

If you feel any of these apply to you, consider consulting our documentation on how to get started using Publish Queue.

Help us test the Publish Queue Manager Beta now by downloading it, installing it and letting us know what you think!