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Movable Type 5 Beta 3

By Beau Smith
Posted October 6, 2009, 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.

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)
  • Download a zipped theme file when user [Exports Theme].(102423)
  • Display “SSI” enable/disable status icon on template listing screens. (102416)
  • Display links to published pages when user searches templates.(102495)
  • Do not create any sample pages when user create a new website or blog. (102269)
  • Motion and Action Stream template-sets are unbundled from Pro pack. These should be re-arranged to themes or addons.(101938, 101939)

Theme and template related cases

  • Unable to rebuild Index Template(s) on Listing Templates screen. (102505)
  • Error when opening Revision History dialog from Edit Template screen (102496)
  • FB:MTEntryImageAsset doesn’t work (102448)
  • mt:AuthorUserpicURL doesn’t work in dynamic publishing (102405)
  • ‘Cached’ icon is always shown on Template Listing screen even if module caching option is disabled (102535)
  • No warning messages when exporting a theme with the same name as an existing theme (102546)
  • Can not publish an archive templates. (102474)
  • Run Callback when applying the theme for blog/website (101307)
  • When having included template of other blogs, “create” link is displayed in the sidebar (83134)

Custom Fields related cases

  • Custom Fields default values are not displayed on dynamically published start-topic.html of Community Forum (102402)
  • Better Categories listing on Edit Custom Fields screen (102403)
  • [Customfields] Display option setting is not saved (102451)
  • Required custom field isn’t displayed (102434)
  • Custom field is not displayed on Edit Entry screen if it’s associated to category (102407)
  • Unable to save required asset customfields (102325)
  • CF: Base name shouldn’t be saved in Japanese or symbols (102556, 102555)
  • CF: Unable to be set “display” not required cf by default (102431)

Automatic website arrangement during upgrade

  • Create websites automatically during upgrade from MT4.x and MT3.x (102473, 102519, 102201)
  • Allow to specify a full site path in blog’s site root (102544)
  • Webpage trackback is broken in website (102590)

Search and Replace related cases

  • User search doesn’t work on the “Select a entry/page author” dialog (102566)
  • Unable to see the system-wide search & replace screen (102563)
  • User who has system-level manage template permission cannot search blogs from Search & Replace screen (102327)
  • Remove ‘Blog’ column from the blog-level Search & Replace screen for entry (102558)
  • Invalid request error when searching entries on the custom fields listing screen (102489)
  • Unable to search blog’s assets on the website-wide Search & Replace screen (102488)
  • Search doesn’t work with regex match option on Search & Replace screen (102455)

User, Permissions, Comments

  • Wrong user list on “Select a page author” dialog (102514)
  • ‘Continue’ button doesn’t work on the dialog of the second page (102450)
  • Default Tag Delimiter setting is always set to ‘Comma’ on system user settings screen (102512)
  • Userpic is not displayed on the header. (102428)
  • Comments from trusted commenters are not immediately approved (102502)
  • Publishing a comment posted via Facebook authentication results in an error (102433)

Other Cases

  • Blog Dashboard sometimes generate error (102432)
  • Cannot send notification mail. (102477)
  • Website list: What should display on System Overview (102460)
  • FB: Text gets garbled in dynamic publishing with latin1 database (102480)
  • Dashboard error after abort restoring blogs. (101948)
  • Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 8 related fixes (102526, 102418, 102603, 102578, 102575, 102562, 102561, 102528, 102507, 102472, 102410)
  • FastCGI: After Create Blog, most of sidebar navigation menus are gone (102521)
  • FastCGI: Need to restart Apache to refresh System Theme Settings (102554)

Known Issues in Beta 3

To be fixed in beta 4.

  • Unable to restore backup (102594)
  • Site root and archive root that start with ‘/’ are not shown properly (102615)
  • Create “MultiBlog Trigger” for “All blogs in this website” (102593)
  • Cannot save pages and entries sometimes on 5.0b1 (102281)
  • [Design] Comment Pagination is only for Classic Template on slapshot (102223)
  • Cannot insert asset on Page/Entry body on FF3.0x (101829)

Found a Bug?

  1. To avoid duplication of efforts, search existing bugs (from the feedback page) before submitting a new bug.
  2. Submit a bug in the Greyhound (MT5) Beta
Back

14 Comments

elicash

elicash on October 6, 2009, 9:57 p.m. Reply

I don’t have time to install this… does it include the ability to easily post an Entry in a single Website to multiple Blogs? If not, then it prevents using Blogs as “sections” of a website, since things often need to be cross-posted.

Beau Smith

Beau Smith on October 6, 2009, 11:31 p.m. Reply

@elicash - Do you really want to have the same entry in multiple blogs within the same website? If you posted the same entry in two blogs then there might be some comments on one entry and then other comments on an entry in the other blog.

If I knew more about your situation, I could probably suggest a solution. It would make more sense to use one of the following techniques to display entries across multiple blogs:

  • multiblog template tags
  • place the entry in multiple categories of a single blog, style each category separately
  • aggregate entries with a specific tag into the entry listings of other blogs using mt:Entries loops with the tags attribute

I’m sure there are more solutions given your exact situation.

elicash

elicash on October 7, 2009, 10:18 a.m. Reply

Comments are on an Entry, not a Blog, so the first concern isn’t a problem.

Basically, right now every section of our website is a Category. If I post a press release about health care, then I need it to go in the health care section and press section. Same if it’s blog AND california. Primary category determines stuff like the header and sidebar.

It’d be nice if each section was a blog, like MT5 seems to want me to do. But there’s no good way to do this, keeping in mind that template changes are out of the question when I’m owning dozens of websites run by people who can’t code changes. Multiblog template tags are no good for that reason. Plus, categories come and go all the time, and the same with new sections.

The second is what I’m doing, but it goes against the whole spirit of MT5. But if that’s the best, then it just means I’m unaffected by the biggest change happening with MT5.

Tags aren’t a real solution.

Beau Smith

Beau Smith on October 7, 2009, 10:55 a.m. Reply

@elicash - duplicating the entry into multiple blogs doesn’t seem like a great solution because then discussion (comments) would be separated between two blogs.

I really think that using categories is the best solution for this. Primary category would have to determine relationships for the entry detail, but the category archive (category entry listing) can be styled based upon the value because the current category is in context.

Using categories to solve this doesn’t “go against the whole spirit of MT5,” MT5’s website feature is about grouping blogs into websites and aggregating content from these blogs. Duplicating content never seems to be an ideal solution; in this case the content would have to be managed in two places, SEO may be effected, there would be two permalinks for the same entry, discussion would be fragmented, etc.

Have you seen Arvind’s CrossPoster plugin? This has the benefit of keeping the entry content in sync at least!

I’m sorry that the feature you desire is not in MT5, I’m curious if many other people have this issue as this is the first time I have ever heard of this feature being requested. Feel free to submit a feature request and detail how you’d like this to work.

dennis.se

dennis.se on October 8, 2009, 7:42 p.m. Reply

I upgraded from 4.3 to 5b2 and now to 5b3, and all types of dynamic publishing seems to be completely broken. All I get is a 500-error. This happens when creating a completely new default blog and setting it to dynamic publishing as well. haven’t tested with “websites”.

Beau Smith

Beau Smith on October 8, 2009, 10:06 p.m. Reply

@dennis.se - Bummed to hear that. Hope you are able to revert to a backup. I have reported the bug for you. Please add any additional notes that might be helpful. Thanks.

Yuji Takayama

Yuji Takayama on October 9, 2009, 12:09 a.m. Reply

@dennis.se - Were there any errors in the web server error log? If you’re getting 500-error messages, there must be more details in the error log. Please add these error log messages to Case 102660. Thanks.

Jack Lail

Jack Lail on October 14, 2009, 2:35 a.m. Reply

I like the admin user interface for MT 5!

Bishnu Timalsina

Bishnu Timalsina on October 16, 2009, 4:26 p.m. Reply

I installed it today and the admin interface looks clean! I’ve been evaluating few enterprise level content management systems to deploy a site that will have hundreds of thousands of articles. They really don’t need to be dynamic. So, Movable Type is getting close to my final pick for the project.

While evaluating the system today, I quickly found two issues: Issue one:

I created 5 root folders with each folders having 1-3 sub folders and each sub folders having 2-4 sub sub folders. To classify these hundreds of thousands of articles, I will need few thousand folders and what I found out is the Manage Folders page that lists these folders don’t have pagination support. Also, there is no option to sort the folders list per their hierarchy level - not just sort by folder name for all folders but sort by name maintaining their hierarchy (this is the must have feature).

Also, I can’t choose categories to publish forum post from the front end (dropdown list contains all the categories though!!).

Sabine

Sabine on October 18, 2009, 1:18 a.m. Reply

I have one Question.

On http://www.movabletype.jp/documentation/mt5/db/mysql-from-sqlite.html I read:

From the Movable Type 5, SQLite and PostgreSQL are no longer supported.

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=de&sl=ja&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.movabletype.jp%2Fdocumentation%2Fmt5%2Fdb%2Fmysql-from-sqlite.html

Is that really true?
I use SQLite since MT 3, it works quite well for many Weblogs and I love it.

Beau Smith

Beau Smith on October 20, 2009, 4:23 p.m. Reply

@Sabine - Yes, it’s true. MT5 will deprecate core support for SQLite and PostgreSQL. But, these databases can still be used with MT if a plugin is written to add support; the Enterprise Pack defines the drivers necessary to use the Oracle database with MT.

MySQL is by far the most popular DB option used with MT, deprecating support for SQLite and PostgreSQL will allow for faster development and testing for future versions of MT.

To help we will publish documentation to assist migrating to MySQL.

CarryP

CarryP on July 13, 2012, 11:57 p.m. Reply

Yeap, the admin page of MT 5 is much better than the previous versions of the system. However, is there a problem with duplicate content or not, because I got a little bit lost from the comments above.

John Lewis

John Lewis on October 25, 2012, 1:13 a.m. Reply

You’ve added some new languages in Moveable Type packages, but when you will start your betas in different than Japanese and English languages?

Gordan G

Gordan G on November 13, 2012, 10:00 p.m. Reply

Ufff, here again I can not see anything more about the different bugs, cos all links leads to nowhere - the starting page of FogBugz. Please fix the problem, because I am interested in the way of the bugs are fixed.