Archive for Movable Type News
Movable Type Monday: Twitter, Google Buzz, Unpublishing, and More
Posted by: | CommentsHappy Monday, folks! I want to start by mentioning a couple of items I missed last week. First, Rob Kenny announced a new version of his HashTag plugin. HashTag posts an update to Twitter when you publish a new entry. In the latest version it works with scheduled entries and pages.
Also last week, Mike released a Google Buzz Action Stream plugin. If you haven’t used Google Buzz, it’s, well, a lot like Action Stream, really: It creates a feed of your activity on multiple social sites. Additionally, you can follow other people’s feeds and comment on items.
This week, Nick from MT-J posted some Twitter tools to tell you about. Motokazu Sekine has written a PostToTwitter plugin similar to HashTag. Also, SKYARC System Co., Ltd created GetTweet, which creates blog entries from your Twitter posts.
Nick also lets us know about the Period plugin from Taku. It lets you set a date when a post should be unpublished.
Besides plugins, we’ve also got a few Movable Type tips for you. Maarten Schenk published the following this week:
- Optimizing Movable Type’s Standard Templates for Speed (part 1) — This is a good explanation of why many of your index templates should not be set to publish automatically.
- Getting the Height/Width of a Thumbnail Generated in Movable Type — Maarten shows you how to access height and width data for your uploaded images.
- Trimming Any Content to a Number of Words in Movable Type — Not every MT tag supports trimming to a certain number of words. In this post you’ll learn how to solve that using regular expressions.
- Blog Specific Content in Signup, Login and Profile Screens — Maarten explains how to give each blog in your MT install a different login page.
- Deleting All Entries from a Movable Type Blog… In One Go! — This is dangerous knowledge, but useful.
Finally, Yujiro Araki explains how to display a list of entries grouped by tag.
What have you done with MT lately? Let us know in the comments.
Movable Type Monday: MT 4.34, Plugins, Themes, Tips, and More
Posted by: | CommentsHappy Monday, folks! We’ve got a lot to cover this week. First off, Six Apart released Movable Type 4.34 on Wednesday. Here’s a few of the highlights from the release notes:
- Corrected a problem with user privilege changes implemented in Movable Type 4.33 that prevented a user from uploading a userpic (a picture of himself or herself) in some situations.
- Fixed a typographical error in the lib/MT/Summary/Proxy.pm Perl module in Movable Type 4.33 that resulted in “subroutine redefined” errors being reported in some circumstances.
- Fixed a problem with the internal search facility within the Movable Type 4 CMS that prevented more than 125 results matching the search criteria to be displayed. Thanks to Mark Carey for the patch.
- Fixed a problem with the internal search facility within the Movable Type 4 CMS that caused all “Regex Match” searches to return no matches.
- Fixed a problem in Movable Type 4.33 where searching for entries by date ranges returned incorrect results. This problem was most noticeable to users of the Blog Stats Dashboard Widget. It often displayed no activity for entries or comments regardless of actual activity.
Lots of new and updated plugins to tell you about this week. First, Dan Wolfgang has updated his More Custom Fields plugin. This new version makes Selected Entries easier to choose, adds a new “Selected Pages” field type, and makes the plugin free for all users.
Mike at Code Monkey Ramblings has updated his Comment Flag plugin. This plugin now sends an email notification when a comment has been flagged.
Mike also has a new plugin. MT Closure Compiler makes use of Google’s Closure service to minify and optimize JavaScript index templates as they’re published.
While you’re there, be sure to also checkout Mike’s WordPress Extended RSS template and all his new themes.
Over at MTJ, Nick tells us about CMSContext, a plugin that allows you to modify the MT admin using MT template tags. It was developed by Junnama Noda.
Hajime Fujimoto is the developer of Numeric Custom Fields, which gives you the option of creating integer and float custom fields.
for out last plugin this week, ParentalInclude by SKYARC System Co., Ltd. makes it easier to include a template from a parent website inside a blog template in MT5.
Over at Movable Tips, Maarten Schenk has several new tips for us:
Template Syntax Highlighting in Movable Type Templating Entries — Maarten uses Google Chrome to add code with syntax highlighting to his blog posts.
Using Movable Type Template Tags to Count Things — Another fun templating lesson. This time, Maarten shows us how to count just about anything, using the like modifier.
Premature end of Script Headers, Error 500, Movable Type and You — This post explains the cause of some common script errors, and gives advice on tracking down the problem.
Displaying a Thumbnail of an Entry Image with the Title of a Post — Here, Maarten shows us how to loop through your entry assets and display a thumbnail image to represent each post.
What have you done with MT lately? Let us know in the comments.
Movable Type Monday: Notes on MT 4.33, Publish Queue Plugin, PicApp
Posted by: | CommentsHappy Monday, folks! While I’m sure many of you are busy trying all the new features in Movable Type 5, a lot of users are sticking with MT 4.x for now. And with good reasons: With the addition of Websites in MT 5, users need time to study how that change will affect their sites. It’s also important to test for plugin compatibility.
If you recall, MT 4.33 came out just a couple of weeks ago. For those that haven’t yet upgraded to that version, Six Apart has some details about the changes. Here’s a quick summary:
- Security Fixes
- New Configuration Directive
- Oracle Database Fixes
- Asset Manager Fixes
- Template Linked to File Fixes
I don’t believe I’ve ever seen 6A go into this kind of detail about a point release before. I hope it continues with future versions.
You should know, though, that some users have had problems with 4.33 wiping out the data on their dashboard. A fix has been checked in and a 4.34 release should be coming soon.
Also this week, I’ve heard about a couple of new plugins that Endevver (and, more specifically, Byrne Reese) is working on. First is Send2PQ, a plugin that will republish your entire blog via the publish queue. It can also email you when it’s done.
The other plugin, PicApp, gives you access to the PicApp service, which allows you to add high-quality stock photography to your blog.
What have you done with MT lately? Let us know in the comments.
Movable Type Monday: MT5, Twitter API, Training, and More
Posted by: | CommentsHappy Monday, folks! As expected, Movable Type 5 was released last week. A lot has changed in this new release, as described in the official announcement:
- A new user dashboard for both the website and blogs. This makes it easy for authors, editors, designers and other publishers to easily navigate between the two.
- A new theme mechanism that makes it easy to apply a new theme across a website and blogs with a single click that proliferates changes throughout the published site.
- Enhanced content management features that include revision history and new custom fields. There are five new object types for custom fields: website, blog, comment, template and asset.
There are significant changes to the UI, which have caused some to claim that Six Apart borrowed the design from WordPress.
First, a nitpick: The similarities are on the entry edit screen, not the Dashboard. Second, the main section and the right sidebar of that page haven’t changed much from MT4, so those similarities are almost three years old. And MT3 had a left-side navigation, which was replaced by the top navigation in MT4. A lot of users found the MT4 navigation confusing, so it’s not surprising they changed it in MT5.
Now, having said all that — yeah, they look a lot alike. the two apps keep trading features back and forth, so it’s not surprising that their UIs would evolve to look similar as well. Still, If 6A wanted to avoid the comparison they should have done more to differentiate the MT UI.
Next, we have a couple of plugins from Byrne Reese. First, his LinkToTheme plugin lets you link a template to a theme, which means that template does not have to be refreshed when changes are made. This has potential to greatly speed up design changes.
Also, Byrne is working on a plugin to allow blogs to support the Twitter API. Other hosted blog platforms have done this recently — by providing an API that matches Twitter’s, these blogs can be accessed from some Twitter clients, like Tweetie and Twitterrific for iPhone.
For those of you looking to develop your own MT plugins, Mike at Code Monkey Ramblings has a tip for adding your own modes to MT::App objects. It’s done via the plugin’s config.yaml file, which I’m finding is a very powerful part of MT’s current plugin architecture.
Finally, the Melody project is doing another webinar this Wednesday, January 13. This time, they’ll be covering debugging and unit testing. Anyone interested in contributing to the Melody project should attend.
What have you done with MT lately? Let us know in the comments.
Six Apart Introduces Movable Type 5 with Interesting New Dashboard Design
Posted by: | CommentsAs much as we love to report about the state of other than WordPress blog software here at BloggingPro, we can not help but give the announcement of the newly introduced Movable Type 5 a WordPress spin. And how could we not, the announcement will be completely overshadowed by the new dashboard design of MT 5.
Seriously, Six Apart? Is it April Fools’ Day today?
There is just too much resemblance to even bother putting both next to each other and point out all the similarities. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!
To say that I am flabbergasted would be an understatement. I can only hope that this is a linkbait and buzz strategy to create some momentum and Six Apart already has a new dashboard design for a soon to be announced MT 5.1. If not, I guess… ‘GPL FTW!’ ?
For those who are interested in the new features:
- A new user dashboard for both the website and blogs. This makes it easy for authors, editors, designers and other publishers to easily navigate between the two.
- A new theme mechanism that makes it easy to apply a new theme across a website and blogs with a single click that proliferates changes throughout the published site.
- Enhanced content management features that include revision history and new custom fields. There are five new object types for custom fields: website, blog, comment, template and asset.
The introduction of content revision history is also an interesting one. I understand that most popular features of all systems find their way into other systems, no matter if blog software platform, operating system or cars, this is a normal process but MT5 has just a little too many similarities at first sight. The possible argument to ease the learning curve for switchers coming from WordPress is a valid one but would also mean that Movable Type admits having lost the battle with WordPress.
For those who can not wait to play with MT5, read all about MT 5 here and download the open source release here. More news about the features of MT 5 on Monday by our in-house specialist Billy Mabray in his Movable Type Monday column.