UPDATE

I've had this idea swimming around my head ever since Planet Mozilla launched but never implemented it because until a few weeks ago I was under the impression that my host did not provide Python.

Anyways, announcing Planet Movable Type.

What is it?

Planet MT aggregates posts from the following weblogs: • 6A ProNet (feed) • Brad Choate (feed) • Chad Everett (feed) • David Raynes (feed) • Girlie's Tips & Tricks (feed) • Learning Movable Type (feed) • MT Forge Dev (feed) • MT Plugins (feed) • MT-Blacklist/Comment Spam Clearinghouse (feed) • Mena's Corner (feed) • Movable Type News (feed) • MovableStyle (feed) • Movalog (feed) • Neil's World (feed) • Phil Ringalda (feed) • Six Apart (feed) • The Tweezer's Edge...

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MT has had the ability to output any content in a template since version 1.0 in 2001, however it doesn't have the "push button" simplicity of Wordpress' Pages feature. For those of you unfamiliar with Wordpress, its Pages feature allows you to create individual static pages (index pages in MT) with the simplicity of the entry screen, i.e. you don't need to worry about the styling or markup – just type out the content and voila, you're done.

This tutorial describes the process to simplify the process of creating standalone pages so that, in essence, you simply need to type out your content. This is useful for using Movable Type as a powerful general content management system.

There are 3 main...

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Workflow, a new plugin for Movable Type 3.1x, has just been released by David Raynes. While we don't usually feature new plugins as part of our news about the Movable Type platform, we thought it was worth pointing out because Workflow adds a powerful new area of functionality, and also marks a milestone for the growth of our plugin community.

First, the features: Workflow lets you limit control of publshing rights to certain authors in your Movable Type installation, allowing other people on the system to act as editors and review entries before they're published. Administrators can control who has rights to any of these levels of permissions. Plus, authors can transfer...

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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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We're happy to announce that this afternoon we released Movable Type 3.1.

We're extremely excited about this new release, and also about how quickly this free update is coming on the heels of Movable Type 3.0 Developer Edition. Whereas it took more than a year between 2.6 and 3.0, we're now releasing 3.1 only three months after 3.0 Developer Edition. The release of 3.0, combined with the changes in licensing, has allowed us to recommit resources to Movable Type development, and that's a big reason why you're seeing major features in a free update released so soon after 3.0.

Here's a look at the major features in Movable Type 3.1.

DYNAMIC PAGES

The Best of Both Worlds

The most prominent new...

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We're proud to announce that Movable Type 3.2 is now available. This release improves upon what is already the most powerful blogging platform by offering a better experience at every step. This new version combines the strengths and innovations you have come to expect from Movable Type over the past four years, boosted by the addition of over 100 unique new features that will help your blogs truly shine.

Best of all, it's a free update for any licensed user of Movable Type 3.x. Personal users will be happy to find that the Free edition now offers unlimited blogs. And personal users who want a multi-user license and access to our famed technical support can now take...

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A year ago this week, trying to keep track of everything I was learning regarding using Movable Type, I wrote my first MT tutorial and launched Learning Movable Type. Stung by comments in the forums to RTFM (read the f%$#ng manual), exasperated that the manual - while thorough - seemed to be written in some foreign geek language understandable only to those who could probably write code in their sleep, and determined that other newbies and non-techies would not suffer the tens and hundreds of hours of lost productivity pulling their collective hairs out over trying to get some dang thing on their MT blog to work, I got to writing.

It must be clear to most technically savvy people who...

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As you probably already know, Movable Type 3.2 was released and boasts a stunning featureset. I personally have plenty of plugins, tools and other announcements to make which are all related to this release. The first of which you've probably guessed by the title. I present the Movable Type Style Generator. Quite simply, click on any element on the page and a box will appear allowing you to change any of the element's properties from background color to font faces and styles. After you're done, hit the Download button to get the stylesheet, 3.2 compatible! The beauty of this style generator is since it creates 3.2 compatible stylesheets, you can use them across any of Six Apart's...

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10.22.2001

Version 1.1 Released

We have released version 1.1 of Movable Type. Existing users should use the upgrade distribution to update their MT installation, and should follow the new upgrade instructions.

New users should download the full distribution after agreeing to the license agreement.

The new release provides some bug fixes as well as some new features; read through the changelog for a full list, or take a look at an abbreviated list of features here.

Posted by Benjamin Trott at 03:38 PM | Permalink

10.19.2001

New Release Scheduled

We are planning a new release of Movable Type for next Monday, October...

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Professional Network member Kevin Shay wrote the following tutorial to introduce the community to his exciting new plugin and its development potential.

The BigPAPI plugin for Movable Type allows you to create plugins that can easily add features to Movable Type's interface. This article explains the background behind the develpment of BigPAPI, and walks through the creation of a simple working plugin.

Why BigPAPI?

With each new version, Movable Type has become friendlier to plugin development. The earliest plugins could do little more than add tags to the platform's templating system. Now (as of version 3.2), the Plugin API allows plugins to define not only template tags...

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Several months ago, author Rogers Cadenhead released the first book detailing MT3 - the Movable Type 3 Bible Desktop Edition. Since Anil mentioned the book in a MT news post on MT books, I thought I would put my 2 cents in about this book.

The first thing you should know is that the MT3 Bible is not a book for non-technically-oriented beginners. The book is filled with great information, but if you are looking for the simplified introduction to Movable Type, this isn't it. Many of Roger's instructions are in the form of Unix shell commands that you would use to manage files on a web server. In fact, the book's second chapter is on how to prepare your web server for Movable Type. If...

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01.21.2002

MT 2.0

Development on MT version 2.0 is going smoothly and we're looking at a early March release. Can you believe it's almost February?

A list of definite 2.0 features: • Multiple category support: The ability to assign multiple categories per entry • Multiple archive template per archive type • Interface modifications, application navigation and icon improvements based on findings from professional usability testing • Power edit screen: Apply title, category or author changes to multiple entries -- using one screen and all at once • More sorting options for the MTEntries tag: alphabetical by title, most recently commented-on, ascending and...

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We've just posted an writeup in the ProNet articles section entitled How to speed up publishing in Movable Type. If you're not using Movable Type 3.1x's dynamic publishing feature and experiencing slow rebuild times, it's a must read.

In addition to this article, we've been working to expand our documentation overall. Some overdue additions to the core Movable Type docs include full documentation of configuration settings, which finally covers all the little details of the mt.cfg file, and comprehensive instructions for Installing Movable Type on Windows.

We'll be continuing to make improvements, but all of these resources should help even the most advanced user find some...

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People who want to start blogging often ask me which tool they should use, Typepad or Movable Type? 9 times out of 10 my answer is Typepad. That's odd, you might think coming from someone who runs a blog all about Movable Type. The answer has more to do with who is asking the question than the relative merits of either program. Both products are created by the team at Six Apart and both are based on the same technology. The main difference between the two is that Typepad is a fee-based hosted service and Movable Type is software that you license to run on your own server or web host. The reason that I more often recommend Typepad is that, unlike Movable Type, you don't have to...

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We realize that official news has been scarce over the last 6-9 months. During this time, our company has grown from two people to seven, and we have launched TypePad. Now that we have hired more engineering resources (and we are still looking for more), we are able to focus again on our Movable Type product line. As mentioned in this post on the Six Log, we're focusing on releasing more personal features in the basic Movable Type package, and concentrating features for businesses, organizations, and large content-driven sites into Movable Type Pro (which, needless to say, has been delayed).

The next version of Movable Type will be version 3.0, a significant and free upgrade....

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Version 3.15 fixes a vulnerability in the mail sending packages for all Movable Type versions in which the user has enabled comment notifications. This vulnerability allows a malicious user to send email through the application to any number of arbitrary users.

All Movable Type users should install this update.

If you already purchased Movable Type, or downloaded the free version, you’ll be able to download the new release for free from your Movable Type account.

For those users who don't want to do a full upgrade just yet, we are also making this fix available in the form of a plugin: zip (1K) or tar/gz (1K) archive. This plugin is compatible with all 3.x versions...

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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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We've just released Movable Type 3.11, an update to version 3.1 which corrects some problems that were preventing many users from upgrading their installations.

If you downloaded the general release of Movable Type 3.1 and had trouble using it straight off the bat, this update is for you. Some other bugs were corrected as well; here's a complete list of changes from version 3.1: • Corrected some problems with upgrades: from 3.0x to 3.1x with Berkeley DB, or from 2.6x to 3.0 with any database system. • Updates to templates were not reflected on dynamic pages after saving an entry; that's now fixed. • In some older versions of Perl, a syntax error blocked any use of the application. • Category paths (e.g. "Mammals / Primates / Orangutans") were being...

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Movable Type 3.0 Developer Edition is finally here, and we've got a lot to say about it. Mena's explained the thinking that went into this new version over at Mena's Corner, where you can get the full story. First, information on our new licenses, new prices, and our commitment to a free version:

As I hope you already know, today we launched the Movable Type 3.0 Developer Edition, what you may not know is that with this release we are also making major improvements in our licensing and support policies.

And, if you've noticed the $20,000 in prizes we mentioned above, you can find out about our commitment to developers:

[W]e are also announcing a contest, called "Plug into...

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Upgrading Movable Type

Problem

You want to upgrade the Movable Type software.

Solution

Upgrading follows nearly the same steps as installation except that you will want to perform a backup of your system before attempting the upgrade. If you are upgrading from Movable Type 3.1x or before, you will also want to migrate to the new configuration file: mt-config.cgi.

Discussion

If you're on any past version of Movable Type, version 3.2 offers a lot of features and improvements that will make managing your blogs easier. To take advantage of them, you'll need to install the latest...

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