One of the great things about Movable Type being localized into a number of languages and having such a broad international presence is that we get great contributions from our community around the world. The latest contribution is Jörg Petermann's Movable Type Cheat Sheet, which he's published in both German and English.

The Cheat Sheet, available in both PDF and PNG formats, covers all the standard Movable Type template tags, as well as common attributes for the tags and the date format used for output. Most of these tags also apply to TypePad's advanced templates as well, so it's worth keeping a copy of the Cheat Sheet handy if you're a TypePad Pro subscriber.

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I've just finished updating the site to Movable Type v2.66. The primary difference in this version of Movable Type is that it offers more protection for comments.

First, the ThrottleSeconds parameter in the mt.cfg file, which is used to only allow comments to post every N seconds, where N is defined by this setting. If not defined, this value defaults to 20 (seconds). This works pretty well and you don't even have to add an entry to your mt.cfg file unless you want to change the time window. In my experience, 20 seems to work fine.

This value is also supposed to be used in the automatic banning of those who post a number of comments within a particular window, but this behavior...

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• 01: Installation and Upgrade • 02: Getting Started • 03: Templates and Layout ...

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One of the primary concerns for this new release of Movable Type was to really enable the creation and management of a community around your blogs. But you can't build your community unless you know who's participating in it, so we've made individual profile pages for each commenter who provides feedback on your blog, along with powerful new listings pages for managing the members of your community.

What's New Since The Last Version?

In Movable Type 3.0x and 3.1x, the platform offered a simple listing of commenters with the commenter's status (whether they were banned or approved), their name, a link to their TypeKey profile, and some simple tools to approve or ban the commenter.

With the new version, we've...

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Far from dirtying diapers and burping up formula and mushed peas, Movable Type is aging quite well. It's gone from the experimental code Ben and Mena first cooked up to a full-fledged, more-than-you-bargained-for CMS that has everyone talking (read: powered by and fuel for discussion). And the future looks bright, with people like Jay, Chad, David, Arvind, Elise on board doing their thing. I swear, one of the biggest reasons I'm such an ardent fan of MT is the community of professionals that keep this well-oiled machine running. Keep doing what you're doing, it's great stuff.

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Installing the Movable Type "nofollow" plugin from Six Apart will automatically update the built-in tags MTCommentBody, MTCommentAuthorLink and the container tag MTPings. The use of the MTPings container should serve to update any URLs contained within, such as those produced by the MTPingURL tag and surrounding template code.

Note that MTPingURL is in use in the default templates (in the Individual Entry Archive and the Trackback Listing Template). In case the MTPings container method doesn't work (and there is no reason that it shouldn't), then you'll need to adjust these templates manually. Nothing appears to happen with MTCommentURL, which would make sense, as it simply displays a...

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Yesterday, Google announced Google Sitemaps, a simple XML file that describes the contents of your site along with straightforward instructions for how the site should be spidered by the search engine.

Today, Niall Kennedy's already released a Movable Type template for generating a sitemap for your Movable Type-powered site.

Like Niall's earlier work on a template for Amazon's A9 OpenSearch format, or the templates for publishing Microsoft Word XML files from Movable Type, these new output options really show off the power of having a simple but powerful system that can output any XML or HTML format just by copying and pasting a template into the application.

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Though it's not a new idea to ProNet members, one of great recurring ideas about how to use TypePad and, especially, Movable Type is as a general website platform. Fred Wilson does a great job of explaining the benefits, and one of the issues that was brought up in Fred's comments is requests for how-tos and documentation of such deployments.

We're always looking to improve our documentation, and if you're considering writing up how you've done a Movable Type deployment, let us know and we'll be glad to link to and promote your article or publish it as a Professional Network article.

To get started, there's a few essays on the topic that have become common references, including Matt...

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Halleluia, the dark ages are over. Six Apart has finally released a new User Manual for Movable Type. Written by gracious and brilliant Tim Appnel, an MT plugin developer (among other things), this documentation helps explain how to use Movable Type from the perspective of what you might want to do with the software. The manual is for MT version 3.2 which is currently in beta, but expected to be released any day now. From all of us who have gone gray from exasperation over trying to make sense out of the MT documentation, thank you to Tim, Jay, Shelley, Kristine, Brenna, Anil, Ben, Mena and the whole team at Six Apart.

p.s. the user manual is still in beta too. So don't be surprised...

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04.24.2003

Milestones

In case you haven't seen it, we made a few announcements yesterday.

In a couple weeks, we'll be going into greater details about how current Movable Type users are going to be able to benefit from the service. Stay tuned.

It's incredibly exciting to see how far we've come with Movable Type/Six Apart and our users and donors have a played a great deal in helping us achieve these milestones. Thank you!

Posted by Mena at 06:53 AM | Permalink

04.21.2003

Support Forum Upgrade

To increase the usability of the support forums, we've installed new forum software that will provide more robust searching...

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Skip navigation. • TypePad • Movable Type • LiveJournal • About Us • Support

May 2004

05.13.2004

Movable Type 3.0 Developer Edition

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...

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Arvind Satyanarayan of the ever helpful Movalog has just released Planet Movable Type, a very useful aggregation of MT-oriented RSS feeds. Have you found the tutorials at Learning Movable Type helpful? Please consider linking to LMT at http://www.learningmovabletype.com/ . Thanks!

Posted by elise on December 14, 2004 to Announcements | Email to a friend | Printer-friendly version

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Copyright © 2004, 2005 Elise Bauer. All Rights Reserved (unless otherwise specified) | XHTML | Powered by Movable Type

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09.12.2002

Blogging over iCal

Morbus Iff has been doing some really interesting things with Apple's iCal and Movable Type. Here's the O'Reilly entry that describes how to publish your weblog into iCal-compatible format.

>From his own weblog, Movable Type blog-to-iCal implementation.

Another thought: since iCal is scriptable, one Ben could write an AppleScript (see below) to gather the latest events in your calendar and publish them to a blogging system via XML-RPC.

Update: Here is an AppleScript called iCal2blog to publish events in your iCal calendar(s) to your weblog via XML-RPC. The README contains usage instructions. Note that you'll need to modify...

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It turns out that it was surprisingly easy to move from one host to another. I'd love to think it's simply my own brilliance, but let's be honest here. Much of the work was easy because I had a copy of the data on my own PC. It was a bit out-of-date, but the general structure was in place. That saved a load of time, especially as I couldn't get FTP access to my prior host.

I did happen to snag a MySQL export from the old host earlier this week, when it seemed as if I was having problems. That was really the magic piece. So I created a new database on the new host, then ran the script as an import. Very sweet indeed.

At first, I couldn't get Movable Type running again. Turns out...

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We waited a while for it, but it's finally here. *much rejoicing*

The beta testing went on for a while, but really it was worth the wait. I'm rarely opposed to waiting for a program to get better; and I wasn't disappointed. The end product is a versatile program that adds both strength and flexibility to it's already powerful core.

And functionality! Some of my personal favorites: • Plugin Central: Plugins add a great deal of functionality to Movable Type's already powerful core. But installing plugins to previous versions would sometimes go forgotten because once the files were copied over, you'd never have any indication that they were there (like Scripturizer or...

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Tim Appnel's written up a rousing endorsement of SQLite as the database of choice for those running Movable Type, especially on local staging environments.

One of Movable Type's strengths is in supporting multiple databases, and Tim makes a good case that the portability, convenience, and simplicity of SQLite should make it your first choice.

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Ogawa::Hacks - Benchmark: Importing Multiple Entries - March 2, 2005 10:59 PMThis benchmark is intended to make clear the performance characteristics of the underlying DB engines which can be used by Movable Type. I recognize this is not a typical transaction for Movable Type....

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As we were proud to announce yesterday, Movable Type 3.2 has been released. We'll be providing a lot more details and documentation in the days and weeks to come, but Brad Choate's started the parade of cool new tips and tracks with his description of LightTPD and FastCGI support in version 3.2.

We're always excited to expand Movable Type's platform support, especially to environments that can improve responsiveness and performance. If you're familiar with the power of LightTPD and FastCGI, you'll want to try out your new Movable Type 3.2 install using Brad's directions.

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Full Speed - links for 2005-08-27 - August 27, 2005 09:19 AM Beastie Boys - A Capella...

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We're taking our first steps towards the release of Movable Type 3.0. The pre-beta version has just finished its initial two rounds of alpha testing and we're now opening the testing to a larger audience (we've picked 300 random addresses from those who applied and will be adding more as time progresses).

The testing that we're conducting will not only help ensure a stable final release but will also give us an opportunity to receive feedback on feature implementation from both users and developers.

Starting today, we'll be giving all of our users much more information on what to expect in Movable Type 3.0.

The official 3.0 release will contain a significant change to the...

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05.22.2002

Wisdom Wanted

Want to contribute to Essential Blogging, the O'Reilly book that Ben and I co-authored along with Cory Doctorow, Rael Dornfest, Shelly Powers and Scott Johnson?

Rael has issued a call for submissions from webloggers who have pearls of wisdom and anecdotes to share with the weblogging community.

Not up to writing? Well, Essential Blogging is holding a public review where you, the readers, can constructively comment on the book's content. Read more about the public review on the O'Reilly weblog of our editor, Nat Torkington.

Posted by Mena at 04:39 PM | Permalink

05.14.2002

Default Templates and...

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I took a look at the default template for an Atom feed, introduced in Movable Type v2.65. This template seems to be where much of the new stuff fits into the new release.

Within the template, we see that there is a new date tag, MTEntryModifiedDate, to make use of the modified field on entries. Taken at face value, the introduction of this tag would seem to invalidate the use of the LastModified plugin by Staggernation. Realistically, you might want to continue using this plugin, as it also offers a conditional tag that you can use in your display to include information only if an entry has been modified.

Another nice addition to this release is the introduction of the utc attribute on the date tags, specifically as it is used on the MTEntryModifiedDate tag. It would appear that this can be used on all date tags, which may mean you can get by without another Staggernation plugin,...

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