We've just launched Movable Type 3.16, which we previewed to Professional Network members on the email list and members-only blog last week. We've heard a lot of good feedback from you about Movable Type since the launch of the Professional Network a few months ago, and this release addresses many of your requests.

The focus for Movable Type 3.16 is on code quality and cleaning up little issues and bugs that have crept into the code base, either in the past year or, in some cases, since Movable Type was first released.

To get started, you can get Movable Type now, or log in to your account to upgrade. Or, read on to find out more details.

A solid, high-quality platform

First, above all you've told...

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The Movable Type team has been hard at work and we have some very exciting things coming in the 2005 release schedule. To kick things off we are proud to introduce Movable Type 3.16.

Movable Type 3.16 sports significant improvements to application security and over one hundred other fixes which really make it a highly recommended upgrade for all users.

Movable Type 3.16 is a simple drop-in replacement for any user who is running version 3.1 or higher. As long as you are running one of these more recent versions, there is no need to run an upgrade script or do anything other than upload the files in the upgrade distribution. Of course, if you're running a version older...

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3.16 (2005.04.13)

Security

• Made several important improvements with regards to application authentication and security.

Notifications

• Fixed ``Send Notifications'' feature for multiple recipients. • Fixed a bug where comment notifications weren't being sent for some moderated comments.

Error checking

• Improved validation of user input in many places. Leading and trailing whitespace is trimmed from author names, category names, and blog names. None of these can be left blank except for a known issue with editing the...

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An upgrade to Movable Type 3.16 can be done a little quicker: by checking file dates, it appears that uploading just the following will perform the upgrade from version 3.15: • docs/ • examples/ (though you really don't need this.) • lib/ • php/ • plugins/ (containing the "nofollow" plugin, which I recommend against using.) • schemas/ • search_templates/ (though if you've customized your search template, don't upload these.) • tmpl/ • tools/ • all root files (mt.cgi, mt-comments.cgi, etc.), except the mt-upgrade files. Don't forget to set 755 permissions on the cgis.

Of course, docs/ and mt.js go in your "static" directory. Everything else goes in...

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Movable Type 3.16 has been released! The upgrade was rather painless - most of the difficulty lies, as it always does, in making sure that I get the plugins in the old install into the new one (I typically install into a new directory rather than try and update an old one). Thus far, looks like it's going okay. Please let me know if not.

One of the coolest features is that the category list on the entry is now sorted with sub-categories. Sweetness indeed! I don't know if they took Arvind's hack to do it, but someone took the time to make it happen, and it looks good.

I'll be spending the next day or so getting everything running as it should, then I'll likely do a bit of plugin...

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In Movable Type 3.16, using the Upload File feature to create a pop-up doesn't work quite right. If specifying a directory to upload to (such as a dynamic upload directory), the "/" character get converted to its HTML entity - "%2f." Obviously, that renders the file path invalid, and your pop-up doesn't work.

Reverting to an earlier-version subroutine seems to fix it. Just replace the subroutine _process_post_upload (starting at around line 1900 in lib/MT/App/CMS.pm. (The MT license prohibits me from recreating the code here, though copying and pasting it yourself is easy enough.)

If you found this article useful, please consider...

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In a nutshell, in MT3.16 when you upload a file and select the file to be displayed as a "popup", the resulting link to that popup returns an error. (the slash before the filename is parsed as its html hex entity %2f rather than / ). This is a known issue in 3.16 and there are a couple temporary fixes floating around. I employed the hack described at danandsherree.com. An alternative (unofficial) fix can be found on the MT Support Forum. The latter changes subroutines other than upload_file, thus I prefer the one from danandsherree since it addresses only the upload subroutine -- it's working fine for me.

Posted by kate on May 4, 2005 08:11 AM filed under MT3.16

PING URL for this...

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Today we are releasing Movable Type 3.17. This release addresses four issues that do not affect the majority of installations, but are critical for users with certain configurations.

Version 3.17 is not a required upgrade if your Movable Type installation is not affected by these issues.

Changes in this release include: • Installation at the root of a domain no longer continually logs out the user. • Fixed URL-encoding of uploaded file paths (e.g. images%2fbeach-pic.jpeg) • Fixed a bug in the nofollow plugin which causes HTML sanitization of everything within an <MTPings> block. • Fixed a bug in mt-db2sql.cgi which caused it to fail in certain situations when subcategories...

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Six Apart has announced that MT 3.17 has been released. This is a minor bug fix release with the main changes being: • Fixed a bug in the nofollow plugin which causes HTML sanitization of everything within an <MTPings> block. • Installation at the root of a domain no longer continually logs out the user. • Fixed URL-encoding of uploaded file paths (e.g. images%2fbeach-pic.jpeg) • Fixed a bug in mt-db2sql.cgi which caused it to fail in certain situations when subcategories are in use before conversion.

According to an announcement in the 6A ProNet, if you are running MT 3.16 and want to upgrade just the files that have changed from MT3.16, you can simply upload these files. Have you found the tutorials at Learning Movable Type helpful? Please consider linking to LMT at http://www.learningmovabletype.com/ . Thanks!...

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Movable Type has a nifty feature called "alternate templates" which allows you to substitute the default MT interface with a customized one. These aren't "individual archive" or "category archive" template replacements, these are replacements for the actual entry-editing interface.

I've only made a handful of alternate templates, but more will be added here as I create and modify them. (You might want to look at set up first.) Currently available are: • Updated 2005/08/29: edit_entry.tmpl is for creating and editing entries. • Added 2005/05/30: preview_entry.tmpl is for previewing entries. (Deprecated. Superceded by the plugin Better Entry Preview.)...

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Many people wanted to know how I implemented these guicktags into my comments form. So here's a quick tutorial for that. In your comments form find

<p><label for="text">Comments:</label> <MTIfAllowCommentHTML> (you may use HTML tags for style)</MTIfAllowCommentHTML><br/> <textarea tabindex="4" id="text" name="text" rows="10" cols="50"></textarea></p>

and replace it with

<div class="quicktags"><p><label for="text">Comments:</label> <MTIfAllowCommentHTML><script src="http://www.movalog.com/mt/js_quicktags.js" type="text/javascript"></script><script type="text/javascript">edToolbar();<...

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You may have noticed that we just announced the release of Movable Type 3.17 over on the MT News blog. This release is a small bug fix release in terms of changes, but an important one for those who are affected by the bugs.

If you're running MT 3.16 and would like to upgrade to this release with the minimum of hassle, you can simply upload the following changed files: • docs/ (a number of files) • README.txt • lib/MT.pm • lib/MT/App.pm • lib/MT/App/CMS.pm • lib/MT/Plugin.pm • lib/MT/Template/Context.pm • mt-db2sql.cgi • php/mt.php • plugins/nofollow/README.txt • plugins/nofollow/nofollow.pl • plugins/nofollow/tmpl/nofollow.tmpl • tmpl/cms/edit_comment.tmpl

For those of you on international versions, you...

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After the dutchpink was released, I had an idea to skin Movable Type such that a user could easily switch between stylesheets. So after a lot of work with javascript, here is the package:

SkinningMT.zip SkinningMT.tar.gz

1. Extract the contents of the distribution 2. Upload the tmpl files in ASCII to the appropriate places (MTDIR/tmpl/cms) 3. Upload mt-styleswitcher.php and the styles/ directory into your StaticWebPath (if none then your into your MT Directory, same location as mt.cgi)

The drop-down menu shows up on the main menu ( screenshot) The only requirement is that your server runs PHP. The styles directory, its contents and mt-styleswitcher.php goes into your StaticWebPath. In mt-styleswitcher.php, change movalog.com to your domain name...

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Hot on the heels of v1.0, here's version 1.1. The only new feature is the availability of dynamic tags, i.e. those of you that wanted to use MT Protect on dynamic templates now can!

Download MT-Protect_1.1.zip and follow the installation instructions. If you installed any older version of MT Protect, you will need to disable and re-enable protection on all your blogs via the global configuration so that the new files get downloaded.

The template markup is identical for both static and dynamic templates!

If you experience a bug or a problem, please file a ticket.

The campaign has not yet reached its target, if you find this plugin useful people consider donating to the campaign.

On a sidenote, Movalog is now...

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•

01: Installation and Upgrade

• Introduction • Choosing the Right Weblog Platform • Finding Perl on your Server...

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Updated August 29, 2005. Originally posted in 2004.

Spammers have discovered bloggers and sooner or later if you allow comments or trackback pings on your weblog you will get spammed.

Blog spam appears in many flavors:

1) Basic comment spam. The spammer leaves a short uneventful message in a comment field in one of your entries. The spam comes from the URL placed in the comments URL field. These URLs link back to every conceivable scam. The spammers leave URLs here to create a link from your site to theirs, thus increasing their Google ranking. Spammers are also now linking to legitimate sites that have not cleared their pages of comment spam, thus increasing the Google rank...

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Today we are releasing a patch to fix an issue for customers running Movable Type versions 3.16 or 3.17 and using UTF-8 character encoding on their weblogs. Specifically, a bug introduced in Movable Type 3.16 causes the dirify routine to preserve dashes in transformed text where, historically, it has suppressed them. This could be problematic because the dirify routine is used to create all URLs in Movable Type.

While default Movable Type installations are not adversely affected by this bug, there are certain common or legacy customizations (which will be detailed below) that could cause problems. For that reason, if you are using UTF-8 and MT 3.16 or 3.17, we suggest that...

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The Touch of Hope web site is powered by Movable Type. It's more than your average blog site though. Don't let it's blogging slant fool you-- MT is a budding CMS!

The architecture is like this: • 1 blog for the site's basic content: welcome page, about page, Art for Hope page, request a site page, make a donation page, contact us page and the news and updates content. All of this is in...

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This is a test with paged "more" text... implemented using a couple of PHP tricks. :)

Read on to see it in action and to see how it's done.

The implementation of paged content is pretty simple. I'll use this test entry to explain how I did it. First of all, you'll need PHP 4 installed on your server. You can use this same technique with other server-side tools like ASP, ColdFusion, etc., but this...

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This morning I saw a flurry of new information from many sources about this thing called rel="nofollow" which is supposed to help stop comment spamming. Read about it's interaction with Movable Type at Six Log, Movable Type, and the Six Apart Professional Network, and a little more generic info is at Google.

Either I don't fully understand what nofollow is supposed to do, or it really is a dumb idea. I'm confident it's the latter.

Well, ok, those who implement nofollow will definitely help in not raising a spammer's Google PageRank. But that's the only benefit. As has been pointed out, a legitimate commenter's link won't count...

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