September 24, 2014
Find plugins and themes more easily than ever
We are happy to announce we have completed beta testing of the new plugin and theme directory, and it is now available at plugins.movabletype.org.
Read MoreJuly 25, 2010
Action Streams Plugin for Movable Type 5 and 4
Did you notice that Action Streams and Community Action Streams plugins have been updated ? Now they work both with Movable Type 5 and Movable Type 4. Action Streams plugin collects your actions on third party web services into your Movable Type web sites. Using it, you can easily aggregate your contents from various services such as Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and also you can write your own recipe to pull the data from millions of websites. Please download the latest version from Six Apart’s GitHub repositry, Downloads for sixapart's mt-plugin-ActionStreams - GitHub Downloads for sixapart's mt-plugin-CommunityActionStreams - GitHub and follow the steps in the documentation. Action Streams Documentation Please enjoy !…
Read MoreDecember 4, 2008
Facebook Connect for Movable Type
Today we are pleased to announce the beta release of the Facebook Connect Commenters plugin for Movable Type Pro 4.23 and MTOS 4.23, following yesterday’s announcement of the Facebook Connect plugin directory as well as Monday’s announcement of Movable Type Motion, which includes the plugin as well. It’s available for immediate download from the plugin directory.This Open Source plugin adds Facebook Connect to any Movable Type powered site and allows any Facebook user to sign in, comment, and share their actions on Facebook.Using Facebook Connect, MT automatically displays a commenter’s Facebook user name and photo next to their comments. Â Then, Movable Type automatically lets all of a commenter’s friends on Facebook know about the comment via the mini-feed on that commenter’s Facebook profile. This helps to drive traffic to your blog — and your content — not just from your community, but from the social network of everyone who participates on your site.And Facebook Connect joins a range of other authentication options which use OpenID to allow commenters to sign in on your Movable Type site. From Google to Yahoo, AOL to LiveJournal to WordPress, or even our own Vox and TypePad services, almost any popular service can be…
Read MoreNovember 10, 2008
Hacking the UI to make Movable Type better
One of the great things about Movable Type is the multitude of ways it provides for folks to modify the core user interface without disturbing existing functionality. In fact Movable Type allows virtually anyone to: easily skin any screen in the application without requiring you to touch a single line of code. And any developer to: transform the user interface on the fly with transformer callbacks - a system inspired by Greasemonkey, a popular Firefox add-on. define their own screens and seamlessly add them to the application via its menuing system, or through page actions. It is these systems that we can use to help prototype and test new functionality and concepts in a more agile way that allows us to be more responsive to the feedback we receive. Take for example one of our latest hacks: an improvement to the User Management area for a blog: This new plugin, available to users of Movable Type 4.2 and greater provides an improved layout and design to the user management area. There is not a lot of added functionality under the hood… yet. That is of course where you come in: what kind of added functionality would you like to see?…
Read MoreOctober 24, 2008
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…
Read MoreOctober 3, 2008
Migrating from Right Fields to Custom Fields - the beta begins
Today we are happy to announce a public beta of a new plugin for Movable Type that helps users using Right Fields on Movable Type 3.x upgrade to Movable Type 4.2 using Custom Fields. There has been a great need in our community for this, which is why some of our veterans stepped up to assemble partial solutions to this problem. These solutions helped a great number of people, but were not able to address everyone’s need universally, because the solution to this problem was not trivial. Recognizing this, we began a process with the community to identify and document what the ideal solution would look like. Then we implemented it so that users who felt they couldn’t upgrade to Movable Type 4 could finally do so. The plugin is called “Linked Entry Custom Fields” because the plugin does not exclusively help you migrate from Right Fields to Custom Fields. The plugin also provides your version of Movable Type Pro with an additional custom field type: linked entries. Linked entries, a feature native to Right Fields, provides a way for bloggers to establish relationships between related blog posts. You can imagine using this feature for example to help curate a…
Read MoreSeptember 10, 2008
Sandbox for Movable Type
Ever thought about radically changing the look of your blog without much design work? Are you a designer who likes to work in semantic HTML and do amazing things with CSS? Maybe you’re moving from WordPress to Movable Type and want to keep your current design. Sandbox for Movable Type may just be what you’re looking for. What began as a hackathon project of between Bryan Tighe and myself a little while ago has yielded some great results: today we’re releasing Sandbox for Movable Type as a plugin that allows the many Sandbox themes to be used on Movable Type blogs as well. (BTW, Hackathons—the ability to spend every Wednesday scratching our own itches—are one of the reasons why I love working at Six Apart. The Vanilla Template Set was another of my recent Hackathon projects.) Sandbox is similar to the CSS Zen Garden in that it showcases the power of CSS—the ability to radically transform the look of a site without changing any of the underlying HTML. Movable Type has always supported this concept. Tools like the Movable Type Design Assistant have made it much simpler to customize the look of your Movable Type blog through CSS alone. And…
Read MoreAugust 22, 2008
Connecting mixi Users with Movable Type Communities
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…
Read MoreJuly 23, 2008
Movable Type 4.2 RC4 and some of our latest hacks
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…
Read MoreJuly 3, 2008
Feeding Comments from your Friends to Movable Type
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…
Read MoreJune 12, 2008
More Reasons to Upgrade to Movable Type 4.2 and RC2
Yesterday we release Movable Type 4.2 Release Candidate 2. This was an important milestone because this is the first release of MT 4.2 that our internal QA teams have fully certified to work against postgres. Release Candidate 2 also contains a number of important bug fixes and brings us one step closer to a full-fledged release. Just by upgrading from Movable Type 4.2 from 4.1, and doing nothing else, we have seen performance increases of 33% while publishing. However it is possible to optimize your Movable Type installation even further by taking advantage of a number of the performance optimization and tuning tools built right into the product. To help our users understand how to best take advantage of these features and to obtain performance increases 45% and higher we have published a Movable Type 4.2 Upgrade Guide to the community wiki. When MT 4.2 is officially released, this guide will be incorporated into our official documentation, but for now we are seeking help from the community to review, refine and make it better. In the meantime, allow me to give you a number of new reasons you may not have heard about to upgrade to Movable Type 4.2: PostOffice…
Read MoreMay 14, 2008
Mapping Movable Type’s Motion
One of the coolest areas of innovation on the web over the past several years has been in the realm of mapping and geolocation. So we’re excited to introduce two new plugins for Movable Type, released just in time for this week’s Where 2.0 Conference here in the Bay Area. Both enable MT users to plug location data (like latitude and longitude) right into your blog entries, and both use the Google Maps API to find locations and display them as custom maps on your blog. And both of these free plugins automatically create new template tags for your blog, making it super easy to publish geocoded RSS feeds, custom layer (KML) files for Google Earth or customized content channels for the new LightPole Mobile Publishing Platform. If you just want to grab the code, here’s the links to these two free plugins: GeoSpatial Simple was developed by Six Apart’s own Bryan Tighe, and is available for Movable Type 4. GeoType was developed by LightPole in conjunction with Six Apart Services, and is available for Movable Type 3.3 and Movable Type Enterprise 1.5. In the spirit of Open Source, the plugin includes contributions from Jef Poskanzer of acme.com and builds…
Read MoreJanuary 30, 2008
Building Action Streams
As my LiveJournal friends know, I’m reading Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam’s 2001 book about the decline in civic engagement in the US since the generation that fought World War II. Without going into his arguments, he shows that the behavior we expect from a civil society has been evaporating since roughly the dawn of television, leaving us with brittle institutions and less resilient lives. There are both a mighty need and a grand opportunity for us to knit our society back together, and I expect us to use the internet to do that. Putnam mentions the idea that the internet lets us connect in ways we haven’t before, but rightly views the utterly unproven possibility with skepticism. I’ve yet to adequately articulate myself on the topic, and I’m still not able to do so here, so instead let’s discuss a meager tilt I took at that windmill: the new Action Streams plugin for Movable Type 4.1….
Read MoreDecember 27, 2007
Integrating Movable Type with FogBugz
We were honored when FogCreek granted us a license to use FogBugz for public case tracking and project management for the Movable Type Open Source project, which is the largest deployment of FogBugz for an open source project. In an effort to repay their kindness, but also to help keep the community as up-to-date as possible on the latest known issues with the product, Chris Hall has implemented a new Movable Type plugin known as MT Fogger. It is a plugin that exposes within Movable Type a set of template tags making it possible to query and display search results from FogBugz within a web site or blog. If you didn’t know, Chris Hall is the man behind the curtain that responds personally to all of the feedback that comes into FogBugz via our feedback submission form. He is also the lead QA engineer for Movable Type (and MTOS) and the creator of MT Booter, a handy QA tool for generating test data for Movable Type….
Read MoreOctober 11, 2007
Podcast with David Recordon about the Open Social Graph
In last week’s ProNet conference call, which is quickly evolving into a call-in internet talk show of sorts, I spoke with David Recordon, the man leading the effort behind the Open Social Graph Project, or “Glue.” If you are interested in learning more about: the open social graph what actually is the “social graph” what the goals are for the project what are the principals that govern its development what kind of products one might build with this technology what is XFN and what are the other protocols and standards that this project is taking advantage of Then this is a great podcast for you. Listen to it now (it is about 41 minutes long); and when you are done check out some of our previous podcasts posted to our ProNet Vox Community. During the call I also gave updates about the Movable Type Open Source project, the Movable Type product roadmap, new plugins like Template Hammer and Ghostwriter and much, much more. Remember our ProNet conference calls are open to the public. Anyone is welcome to join and participate in the conversation we have there….
Read MoreSeptember 10, 2007
One more reason to buy an iPhone
For a long time now I have been one of those iPhone hold outs that insists on waiting for the next generation before taking the iPhone plunge. But today could be the tipping point for me and many other Movable Type users like me. Today we are happy to announce Movable Type for the iPhone and iPod Touch, made possible through a plugin developed by Brad Choate that makes use of the design developed by Walt Dickinson for TypePad. The plugin works by installing an alternate template set that is automatically used in place of the primary Movable Type user interface when the application is accessed via an iPhone or iPod Touch. The integration with Movable Type is totally seamless. Walt has done an amazing job creating a truly thoughtful user experience. He certainly had the option to just boil down the application to a smaller, more browsable version of itself. But he didn’t. Instead Walt designed the ideal user experience for iPhone from scratch. He created custom graphics, layouts and entirely new screens for the application in order to make this plugin feel like a completely native iPhone application. The plugin, and its design, is completely free and open…
Read MoreSeptember 7, 2007
Podcast with Dan Wolfgang
In this week’s bi-week community conference call we decided to shake things up a bit and change the format of the call. So, in addition to briefing the community of Movable Type news, the product roadmap and other Six Apart developments, I spent the majority of the time interviewing and getting to know one of the callers and members of our community. The lucky winner? Dan Wolfgang, the creator of one of Movable Type’s most popular plugins: Better File Uploader, “BFU” as the community calls it. In our conversation we talk about how he got started using Movable Type, how he became a developer on the platform and the process he went through in building BFU. He also shared with me what’s next for the MT4 compatible version of MT4, something he plans to release in the coming weeks alongside the multitude of other plugins our developer community is creating. Dan was a great sport in allowing me to put him on the spot as I did; for which we should all be incredibly grateful….
Read MoreAugust 27, 2007
Its not just a blogging tool anymore
More and more people are making the switch to Movable Type or choosing Movable Type for their next big web project because people are beginning to see that MT4 is not just a blogging tool anymore. In actuality It is very capable web site management tool with its: Built in support for pages Ability to allow users to manage image, audio and video content Extensible Asset Management System Centralized management capability of multiple blogs and web sites These features are helping businesses see how Movable Type 4.0 can be used to replace large bulky Content Management Systems at a fraction of the cost. And nothing illustrates Movable Type’s content management capabilities more than the community’s most popular plugin: Custom Fields. In fact, when asked the question, “if you could have one and only one plugin installed in Movable Type, which would it be?” more people indicated Custom Fields, or the ability to add custom fields to a blog than any other plugin. Which shows, Custom Fields is not just for businesses because it allows anyone to build the web site they need, not the web site we think they need. Before we started development on 4.01 we asked Arvind, “what…
Read MoreAugust 16, 2007
Holy Moly! Graphical visitor stats for your blog.
Check out the latest plugin from the community: real time visitor statistics for your Movable Type 4.0 dashboard. Mark Carey, the developer of the plugin and the guy behind the very popular site MT Hacks has been busy building a number of different plugins specifically designed for MT4, not to mention updating some of his other popular plugins like Fast Search and some user interface plugins to customize the user interface to work better for him. And that’s not all, the community has produced a number of other great plugins in the last couple of days. For example, those of you pining for the olden days, Arvind has made a great retro dashboard widget called “My Blogs” which surfaces an MT3 style blog listing widget for your MT4 dashboard. Cool!And for those of you pining for the even older days, you might recognize the name of another one of our plugin authors: Ben Trott. His Refeed plugin makes it easier than ever to turn any RSS or Atom feed into posts on your blog. I know I plan to use this plugin personally to aggregate my twitters, my Flickr photos, my Vox posts into a single unified system.What plugins would…
Read MoreAugust 14, 2007
Introducing the New Movable Type Plugin Directory
Today we are excited to announce the official release of a brand new and completely redesigned Movable Type Plugin Directory. This new directory is a resource designed and developed by and for the community.The Directory is powered completely by Movable Type 4.0 enabling us to build a site that contains a number new features and enhancements its predecessor never had:local authentication and registration to make it easier for developers to manage their contributionscustomizable screenshot slideshows for users to more easily preview a plugin’s functionalityratings to help the community inform one another about what is most popular and most recommendedreviews and comments allowing users to leave feedback to the author of the plugintags to assist visitors in navigation and discovery of pluginsrestructured category hierarchy for a simplified and more organized directoryLogin or create an account now!It really is a whole new world for Movable Type: there’s a new product, a new web site, a new plugin directory and a bunch of new plugins that work with MT4… and believe it or not, we are still just getting started. The coming weeks and months still have a lot in store for the community. Stay tuned!…
Read MoreJuly 2, 2007
First Movable Type 4 Plugin released
This weekend, Kevin Shay, the developer behind several of Movable Type’s most popular plugins, release the first Movable Type 4 plugin. Some credit should go to Arvind as well who has been working on upgrading Custom Fields to work with MT4, but Kevin’s plugin represents a truly original MT4 idea. Bookmarks is a plugin that allows users to maintain a list of bookmarks to any page in the application. The list is easily accessed through a “Bookmarks” menu, which is used for managing and adding items to the list as well. In addition, each user can maintain their own set of unique bookmarks, turning Movable Type into a much more personalizable application. Major kudos to Kevin Shay. Now we need to launch our new plugin directory so that plugins like Kevin’s and Arvind’s have an equally awesome home to be listed and promoted….
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