December 10, 2009
Movable Type 5 Release Postponed to Jan 5th, 2010
By Beau Smith and posted in MT5.
We’ve determined that there are a few issues we need to resolve in Movable Type 5 before the official worldwide launch. In order to resolve these issues and due to the holiday season, the release of Movable Type 5 has been postponed untill January 5th, 2010. The latest release candidate builds of Movable Type 5 are available: Movable Type 5.0 Pro Betas (available in English, German, Spanish, Dutch and French.) Warning! - This beta software is not recommended for any production environment. Between now and Jan 5th we’ll be producing new documentation and updating existing documentation. We’ll be highlighting new documentation on this blog, you can find the latest updates on the following pages: Recently Updated Documentation MT5 specific documentation If you have questions about Movable Type: listen to the MT5 Q & A Conference Call discuss Movable Type on the MTOS-dev mailing list read and post questions in the Movable Type Forums submit a bug, feature request or get paid support…
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December 5, 2009
Movable Type 5 Release Postponed to Dec 16th
By Beau Smith and posted in MT5.
In order to launch Movable Type 5 with more developer documentation, we’ve decided to delay the release of MT5 until December 16th. In the meantime we’ve made the latest release candidate builds of Movable Type 5 available: Movable Type 5.0 Pro Betas (available in English, German, Spanish, Dutch and French.) Warning! - This beta software is not recommended for any production environment. If you have questions about this release candidate or Movable Type 5: listen to the MT5 Q & A Conference Call discuss Movable Type on the MTOS-dev mailing list read and post questions in the Movable Type Forums submit a bug, feature request or get paid support If your question doesn’t fit into one of the above places add a comment to this post and we’ll get back to you….
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December 3, 2009
MT5 Q & A Conference Call
By Beau Smith and posted in MT5.
You have questions about MT5, we have answers… Six Apart will host two half-hour calls this Friday to answer all your questions about MT5. Update: Fri, Dec 4 1:30pm Listen to the recorded conference call…. Answers to these questions and more will be placed into an official FAQ released with MT5….
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December 2, 2009
Rewritten Install & Upgrade Documentation for Movable Type
By Beau Smith.
George Drapeau recently wrote about his experience Installing and running Movable Type on OpenSolaris. Though George seems to be technially savvy, installation of MT is not always easy because each server environment in which it is installed is different. A few months ago (with the help of a few Perl hackers at Six Apart), I wrote a step-by-step guide to Install Movbale Type on a Mac which required the installation of a foundation of software commonly pre-installed by most web hosting companies. This included Xcode Tools (specific to MacOS), MySQL, PHP5, Perl modules, Image Magick and common image libraries. While I can install Movable Type without assistance, I needed guidance to install the system software which is commonly installed by most web hosting providers. When a web host meets the system requirements for Movable Type, installation is as easy as installing any of today’s self-hosted CMS products. I’ve rewritten the install and upgrade guides with a progressive disclosure of detail such that those already comfortable with performing such installations have access to simple guides. These guides will work for both MT4 and MT5. Quick Install Guides Install via FTP using the Configuration Wizard Install via SSH with manual configuration of…
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November 28, 2009
Movable Type 5 Status
By Beau Smith and posted in MT5.
Movable Type 5 will be available December 8th in the US and European markets. It’s been moved one week to provide more time for coordination of the release and associated documentation. MT5 was released in Japan on Nov 26th. Hold tight and you’ll have Movable Type 5 shortly. Thanks. Movable Type 5.0 RC3 was available from Nov 19th to 25th. Because MT5 was released in Japan, we have taken down the betas until MT5 is officially released in the US. Fixes in Movable Type 5 Release Candidate 3 Resolved Issues FogBugz 103151: Yahoo! (and possibly Yahoo! Japan) may have to be removed from the list of commenter auth (Fixed : 103151) FogBugz 103149: funny URL on blog create screen. (Fixed : 103149) Additional known issues on RC3 FogBugz 103142: “Statement has no result columns to bind” error occurs in with old MySQL client. Please update DBI and DBD::mysql. ( 103142)…
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November 18, 2009
Movable Type 5.0 Release Candidate 2
By Beau Smith and posted in MT5.
Movable Type 5.0 Release Candidate 2 is now available. Here’s the highlights… A lot of work to get the dynamic publishing in sync with the static publishing. Updates to the Professional blog templates Unbundling of Motion and Action Streams The Entry/Page “previous” and “next” container tags now account for entries/pages with the same date-time, rather than skipping them. And many more bug fixes. Release Notes for MT5 RC2 Movable Type 5.0 RC2 Release Notes Resolved Issues in MT5 RC2 Known Issues in MT5.0 “Won’t Fix” in MT5 Download Warning! - This software is not recommended for any production environment. Movable Type 5.0 Pro Betas (available in English, Japanese, German, Spanish, Dutch and French.) Check out the Pre-Release Software License Agreement for more details about using the software. Please report bugs and submit feature requests you find. Plugin Support Many MT4 plugins will work with MT5 (or only need minor updates) as much of the core functionality in MT5 hasn’t changed dramatically. Plugins which do not work correctly in MT5 due to the following reasons: The most common reasons for plugins not working in MT5: Plugin relies on a transformers (code which searches for other code to replace) may be broken…
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November 6, 2009
Movable Type 5.0 Release Candidate 1
By Beau Smith and posted in MT5.
Movable Type 5.0 RC1 is available today. Here are the highlights… New Theme Pico, a clean and simple theme (also available on TypePad and designed by Jim Ramsey) is now bundled with MT5. Styles can also be bundled with a theme to easily offer different flavors of a theme. (Styles are a combination of a stylesheet and images to bundle with a theme.) Documentation MT5 documentation is beginning to appear online. We’re releasing them as they are available: English: www.movabletype.org/documentation/mt5/ Japanese: www.movabletype.jp/documentation/mt5/ Some documents are still in a draft state. Please leave any comments on the individual docs if you have questions or comments. Issues Triaged Resolved Issues in MT5 RC1 Known Issues in MT5.0 “Won’t Fix” in MT5 Download Warning! - This is beta software and is not recommended in any production environment. Movable Type 5.0 Pro Betas (available in English and Japanese) Check out the Pre-Release Software License Agreement for more details about using the software. Please report bugs and submit feature requests you find. Release Schedule The release schedule has been updated, here’s the current plan: MT5.0 RC2 - scheduled for November 18th. MT5.0 - first week of December (November 26th in Japan) should all go according…
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November 3, 2009
Movable Type 5 Documentation
By Beau Smith and posted in MT5.
Thanks for everyone’s input and suggestions to improve the documentation for MT5. Here’s a list of places to find updated and brand-new documentation: MT5 Documentation Index - an index listing all pages which are tagged Updated for MT5, New in MT5, or Bug in MT5 Recently Updated Documentation One highlight…. Creating themes for MT5 - this was requested by lots of people in the community and should get you started. Our goal is to create a few sample themes, and place them in a GitHub repository. The documentation for MT5 is being initially created by the Japanese Movable Type team as they are leading development of MT5. We’re working with a translator to convert to English and then going through each document to clean it up, reformat it, test it, and add more examples. We’ve been notifying the Japanese team whenever we have significantly changed the document so that they can translate it back to Japanese. Next up is the process of converting the documentation site itself to a more topic-based structure, rather than the current organization (by user-type). We’re converting pages that list tags in Movable Type to index templates with loops to output pages: by folder, tag, etc….
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October 21, 2009
Movable Type 5 Beta 4
By Beau Smith and posted in MT5.
Movable Type 5.0 Beta 4 has been released! Included is the first website theme for the “Professional Website Theme” and many other bug fixes. This beta is scheduled be the last beta before there are two release candidates. At this point we’re targeting for a late November launch of MT5. A more specific date will be available as MT5 code stabilizes. Please report bugs found during your testing. Download Warning! - This is beta software and is not recommended in any production environment. Movable Type 5.0 Pro Betas (available in English and Japanese) Check out the Pre-Release Software License Agreement for more details about the software. Resolved Issues in Beta 4 Major changes “Professional Website Theme” is added as a new theme.(102154) WebsiteLabel has changed to WebsiteName (102727) Remove the definition of active users from app (102776) Keep a compatibility of plugins (102731) Create “MultiBlog Trigger” for “All blogs in this website” (102593) MultiBlog Trigger also for “Pages” not only for “Entries” (102627) UI: “Created, Published, Edited” date and time of the entry (102385) DOC: FastCGI: Unable to access with XML-RPC (102513) Note: Because default template sets and global templates have been updated, all template sets (including global templates) must…
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October 6, 2009
Movable Type 5 Beta 3
By Beau Smith and posted in MT5.
Movable Type 5.0 Beta 3 is ready! Beta 3 includes many improvements based on user feedback. While similar to the previous betas… Beta 3 feels very fresh and new due to the tightening of various user interface elements. Beta 4 will be the last beta before there are two release candidates. At this point we’re targeting for a late November launch of MT5. A more specific date will be available as MT5 code stabilizes. Please report bugs found during your testing. Download Warning! - This is beta software and is not recommended in any production environment. Movable Type 5.0 Pro Betas (available in English and Japanese) Check out the Pre-Release Software License Agreement for more details about the software. Major Improvements in Beta 3 Automatic website provisioning based upon blog domain names during upgrade from MT4.x and MT3.x 102466. Allow sub-domain blogs under one single website 102466. Selected tab is saved on “Websites and Blogs” widget on the user dashboard, so once the user clicks the “blogs” tab, this tab will be selected upon subsequent visits.(101689) [Create New] shortcut button on Website/Blog dashboard.(102333) Cleaner and simpler User Dashboard.(102338, 102331, 102429, 102339) Improved menu and button placement on [Edit Entry/Page] screens.(102391)…
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September 29, 2009
Movable Type 4.32 Bug-fix Release + Zemanta plugin
By Beau Smith and posted in News.
Many of you are looking forward to using MT5 exclusively, but truthfully you may be content with MT4 or maybe you’re unable to upgrade because a plugin you rely upon may not yet be ported to MT5. So until MT5 is solid and there is little demand for MT4, Six Apart will continue to release new versions of MT4.x as necessary to provide fixes for various security issues and bugs which are major pain points. Small features may be potentially included as well. Download MTOS-4.32-en [zip] [tar.gz] [other languages] MT4.32 fixes a handful of minor bugs which are detailed in the Movable Type 4.32 release notes. One of the commits in MT4.32 was to bundle the Zemanta plugin. Zemanta has committed to supporting the development of Movable Type; what better partnership than that of a content management system and a service to recommend quality related-content? While it may not be useful for every blogger, it can be very helpful in the case where you need an image, links to related articles, help with tags for an entry, etc to have a more compelling blog entry. Check out the Zemanta FAQ for more info on how Zemanta’s services may be useful…
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September 17, 2009
Movable Type 5 Beta 2
By Beau Smith and posted in MT5.
Movable Type 5.0 Beta 2 is now available… Download Warning! - This is beta software and is not recommended in any production environment. Movable Type 5.0 Pro Betas (available in English and Japanese) Check out the Pre-Release Software License Agreement for more details about the software. Beta 3 Beta 3 is now under development and will be primarily focused on various UI improvements. Read on for Known Issues in Beta 2 and Resolved Issues in Beta 2. Read more about MT5. Release Notes Movable Type Beta 2 All Release Notes…
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September 2, 2009
Movable Type 5 Beta
By Beau Smith and posted in MT5.
Are you ready for this? We’re really stoked. Today begins a 2-month period of beta releases and official quality assurance testing. Though we still have loose ends to tie up, we wanted to get the code so that people could begin to use it and provide feedback. We plan to release a new beta version every two weeks until the app is stable. Once stable, we’ll be creating release candidates. And we’re hoping to offer a stable build in mid November. For those who are dying to download it now… Download Warning! - This is beta software and is not recommended in any production environment. Movable Type 5.0 Pro Betas (available in English and Japanese) We also have a Pre-Release Software License Agreement if you’re interested. Quick links: Bug? | Feature? | Beta Forum | Source Code | Release Notes | Known Issues About Movable Type 5.0 For those who aren’t distracted with downloading and installing… here’s a little history: Development of MT4.3 and 4.31 were led by the Services team in the US and was primarily focused on app performance, resolving pain points common on large installations, making some of their most popular plugins part of the core product,…
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July 29, 2009
MT 4.3: Faster Performance, Powerful Search, More Page Views
By Matt Jacobs and posted in News.
Today marks the official release of Movable Type 4.3. While we’ve been previewing the features over the last week, below is a hit list of the biggest features. If you’re looking to download MT Pro, click here. Smarter Search and Pagination We’ve added several new ways to drill down your search (author, category and date), which lays the groundwork for the ability to paginate your index and archives. With a static first page and dynamic additional pages, your site gets the added page views with faster publish times. Additionally, we’ve added the ability to paginate comments, which will dramatically improve publish times on prolific comment threads. Entry Asset Manager MT’s smarter than ever with the way it handles assets like photos, which means it’s much easier to make slideshows and editing entries that use assets is even faster, with more control over your code. Read more » Summary Object Framework This is our first step in dramatically improving performance for our largest MT installations. This framework allows MT’s core codebase and plugins to store arbitrary summary information in the database, replacing expensive calculation queries with fast primary-key lookups against summary tables. The framework includes a flexible mechanism for invalidating summary…
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July 28, 2009
Features of 4.3: Smarter Blog Cloning
By Matt Jacobs and posted in News.
Up until the general release of MT 4.3, we are publishing details on the features of 4.3. Today we’ll focus on blog cloning. For quite some time, blog cloning has been built into Movable Type. It was created to help add a new blog without having to recreate templates, categories or anything else. The problem was that most often there was never the need to clone everything in a blog. Movable Type 4.3 has added some new features to the cloning process: Ability to omit specific content from the cloning process. The following content can be omitted: Entries/Pages Categories/Folders Comments Trackbacks It may seem like a minor addition, but it can save precious time while developing a site. Ability to specify critical blog settings for the new blog before cloning to prevent accidentally overwriting existing content. The following fields may be set before cloning: blog name path URL Several more checks (e.g., a confirmation page, better defaults) have been added to make this process rock solid. Personally, it has already made testing and setting up a few new installations much easier and faster. I hope this feature will scratch an itch for many of the Movable Type consultants out there….
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July 24, 2009
Features of 4.3: Entry Pagination
By Matt Jacobs and posted in News.
Up until the general release of MT 4.3 (beta info here), we are publishing details on the features of 4.3. Today we’re looking at entry pagination. 1,000 Entries One of the categories on my blog is now up to nearly 1,000 entries and it has become difficult to display them. Movable Type offers the ability to split up the category content by date (e.g., Category-Monthly archives), but that would still require me to publish all of the content statically. I could use dynamic publishing, but then I would lose the speed of a statically published page on the front-end. Situations like these, and a long-standing pubilc request, is why we’re now introducing a dynamic way to paginate your index and archive templates using MT-Search. With this solution, you’re able to publish the first 10 or 20 (or whatever you’d like) entries statically and paginate through the remainder dynamically. What’s even better is that it only requires a few changes to your index or archive template to generate the content for MT-Search. Getting Pagination on Your Blog We’ve put together a guide to paginating with static templates that provides details on the new querystring parameters and sample template code. It’s based…
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July 22, 2009
Features of 4.3: Entry Asset Manager
By Matt Jacobs and posted in News.
On Monday, Beau posted about our effort to update the docs for MT 4.3. Today I’m coming to you with information on one of our new features — the entry asset manager. An Easier Way Up until now, the only way to associate an image with an entry was to place it in the entry body. Upon save, Movable Type would write that association to the database. In order to do this, there a form tag was placed around the image (that was stripped out when you published), which was confusing to many. In 4.3, we decided to make this relationship clearer and easier to manage. As you can see to your right, every image associated with this entry is listed in a new sidebar widget on the edit entry page. Hovering over the image shows you a thumbnail. Clicking on ‘Add New’ in the widget only adds the image to the list, not the entry body. This means you can now use the mt:EntryAssets tag to access assets without inserting them into the entry body. Of course, you can still add images to the entry body, but now they won’t have that ugly form tag. Not only is this…
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July 20, 2009
Documentation Update
By Beau Smith and posted in News.
This week we’ll be previewing some of the new features of Movable Type 4.3 (try the Movable Type 4.3 beta). I’ll start the week off with a post on the my progress updating and improving the Movable Type documentation and Matt Jacobs, MT product manager, will be posting about other features of MT 4.3 later in the week. Intro In product documentation, the manual is the product. If a feature isn’t defined, it doesn’t exist as far as the user can tell. If a feature is described badly, the user will perceive the product to be a bad product. Thus, do not skimp on the documentation. Randal L. Schwartz, Perl author Documentation should be an integral part of the development of a new feature. It should start as a Specifications document, then be used for Quality Assurance testing of the feature, and then published publicly as the Official Documentation for the feature. Describing how a feature works provides new insight into how it could be coded better, reveals bugs, or gives inspiration to new features. Documentation is even important to the developers who wrote it as sometimes they have totally forgotten their strategy at the time, or perhaps their experience…
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July 9, 2009
The Beta for Movable Type 4.3 is Now Open
By Matt Jacobs and posted in News.
Earlier this evening we made available the first pre-release version of Movable Type 4.3. For more information about this release, we’ve created an MT 4.3 beta page. There, you can find release notes, known issues, the download link and information on how to submit bugs and get involved in this release. Here’s what you should know: This release has most of 4.3’s new features, including comment pagination and a new entry asset manager. The first release is an alpha (MTOS-4.3a1) and we’ll have 2 more releases during the beta period. The final release will be in 3 weeks. While this release has been stable in our testing, remember this is alpha software and is not intended for use in a production environment. Last, but absolutely not least, we have overhauled the reference documentation for this release. Beau is going to post soon with more details about this, but we’ve already updated nearly 100 pages. He’ll also provide information about how you can get involved in improving the docs. Please download the alpha today and take it for a spin. We rely on input and contributions from community members to make these releases shine and hope you’ll have a hand in…
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July 7, 2009
Looking ahead to MT5
By Matt Jacobs and posted in News.
We are happy to announce that MT5 is coming and invite you to participate. But first, here’s some information on what’s in store for Movable Type 4. Later this month, on July 29th, we’ll be releasing Movable Type 4.3. This release contains comment pagination, a variety of bug fixes and some significant performance and scalability improvements that make it the most robust release ever on MT. Tomorrow, we’ll make available our first pre-release build of 4.3. It will be an alpha, which means we’re still finishing up a few features and the software is absolutely not production ready. So why release it? We want all of you to give it a whirl and try out what we’ve been working on. As we approach the launch date, we’ll continue with several beta releases to fix any bugs found by you and our development team. I’ll have another post up tomorrow with links to the build and information on submitting bugs. In the meantime, work has begun on MT5. We have started the requirements process and early development work on MT5 with particular focus on better content management and ease of use. As we gear up towards the first Movable Type Pro…
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June 23, 2009
Meet Melody
By Benjamin Trott and posted in News.
When Mena and I started working on Movable Type almost 8 years ago, one of the most delightful surprises in the project was how a passionate and creative community sprung up around the platform almost immediately. They even seemed to like the default name “Melody Nelson” we gave to the sample user that came with the application.1 Just a year and a half after the happy news of Movable Type’s release under the GPL license, Melody makes another appearance as we mark an exciting milestone for the community. Today, a number of long-time Movable Type community leaders, including some who supported MT right from that first release 8 years ago, are announcing Melody. In short, Melody is a project to catalyze the core community of developers who want to evolve the open source core of Movable Type. Where our official Six Apart releases of Movable Type focus on great professional support, rock-solid stability, backwards compatibility, and broad platform support as core principles, we see the Melody community focusing on the equally-valuable ideas of bleeding-edge community-driven ideas, rapid iteration, and integration with the code of other open source projects. It’s great news for the entire Movable Type community, as this new project uses…
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June 17, 2009
MT 4.261: A Small Patch Release
By Matt Jacobs and posted in News.
We just made MT 4.261 available in your Movable Type account and to the community on movabletype.org. The changes were minor and are detailed in the release notes. Primarily, we updated the schema version to include newly created database indexes. If you hadn’t yet downloaded 4.26, we posted about the release last week. For your convenience, here are links to download the new version: MTOS-4.261-en.tar.gz MTOS-4.261-en.zip…
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June 10, 2009
MT 4.26 Now Available
By Matt Jacobs and posted in News.
We just announced the availability of MT 4.26 on the MovableType.com blog. This optional performance release includes bug fixes and feature improvements. No new features have been added. MT 4.26 provides dramatically better search performance for large datasets and improves performance and reliability around TheSchwartz. More details can be found on the release notes, or you can just use the following direct download links to get MTOS 4.26: MTOS-4.26-en.tar.gz MTOS-4.26-en.zip We want to thank everyone in the community for your ongoing feedback and suggestions for improving Movable Type. While this release doesn’t address every bug report and potential performance enhancement, we are continually working to improve your experience and satisfaction with Movable Type. New MTE 4.26 config directives Core DisableObjectCache ObjectCacheLimit RPTFreeMemoryLimit RPTProcessCap RPTSwapMemoryLimit SchwartzClientDeadline SchwartzFreeMemoryLimit SchwartzSwapMemoryLimit Enterprise Pack DatabaseRoles DBCheckSlaveStatus DBMaxReplicationLag DBRetryDuration And some bonus config directives for MT 4.25… New in MT 4.25 config directives Core AssetFileTypes DefaultTemplateSet FastCGIMaxRequests FastCGIMaxTime Commercial Pack EmbedDomainWhitelist Community Pack ReturnToURL…
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May 22, 2009
Quick Fixes for Common Itches
By Anil Dash and posted in Tips & Tricks.
Every once in a while, if you use Movable Type long enough, you can run into little glitches or things that are confusing. We thought we’d round up a couple of random ones that have seemed common lately, with the hopes that it makes things a little more fun and a little less frustrating. Filtering entries by category name gets weird if my category name has spaces! This one cropped up in Movable Type 4.25 (the release where Motion was introduced). If you have a category name like “Diamonds & Pearls” and you set <mt:entries category=”Diamonds & Pearls”>, you get an error instead of your entries! No good. So, we made a quick little patch (link outdated) to fix it. Just follow the outlined steps there and you should be set. Sometimes I can’t click into the text editor when writing an entry or page! Oooh, tricky. What’s probably happened here is your mt-config.cgi file lists the full path for your site’s MT install, something like StaticWebPath http://www.example.com/mt/mt-static/ but you’ve visited your MT install at http://example.com/mt/, without the “www” part. Because of the web browser security works, MT can’t load the editor part of the Create Entry screen, and that makes…
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April 18, 2009
Open source releases from Six Apart Services
By Steve Cook.
Six Apart Services has a bag of tricks that would make Felix proud. Over the last few weeks, we’ve released several pieces of code as open source that we think other developers might want to add to their own magic bags. Bob the Rebuilder A utility class using run-periodic-tasks to continuously rebuild blogs on a scheduled basis. (Note that rpt must be enabled for Bob to do anything.) Reblog Reblog pulls feed entries from RSS or Atom feeds and turns them into Movable Type entries. Imports can be run either manually or in the background using run-periodic-tasks. UnrecognizedTags UnrecognizedTags implements a system-level Tools menu item that will compile every template in the installation and report on all instances of unrecognized tags, collated by tag and listed by blog and template. We’ve used Bob on a number of projects to keep index pages fresh when they’re being populated by items such as ActionStreams that don’t trigger a rebuild; Reblog is a utility knife that enables some highly complex content aggregation; UnrecognizedTags is incredibly helpful to keep templates from breaking when upgrading legacy systems or replacing plugins. Additionally, we’ve pushed out the Services versions of two existing developer tools. MT::Test(now nonavilable) The…
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