Over the past two weeks, we've been telling the world a lot about Movable Type 3.2 and now it's time to show it.

Today, we are releasing the first beta version of Movable Type 3.2 and we encourage everyone to download it and see for themselves.

You can find the details over on the Beta Blog. We hope to see you over there!

Previous Entry: Intermittent "500 Server Errors" in MT (RESOLVED)

Next Entry: Introducing BigPAPI: A new plugin framework

...

continue reading ...

Today marks the fourth anniversary of the release of Movable Type. Since its start in 2001, millions of people have downloaded, blogged with, and read sites powered by Movable Type, and we're thrilled to mark the birthday by saying thank you to the community that's made it possible.

From professional bloggers to plugin developers to people running personal communities, we've been inspired and motivated by all of you, so thanks for making the platform a success around the world. Whether it's seen as a powerful blogging tool or a lightweight CMS or just "the way we talk to the outside world", we're proud that it's inspired thoughts like the ones below:

From SFist, We Love Movable Type!...

continue reading ...

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...

continue reading ...

Everyone loves having a great looking site, but for most people who aren't well versed in the technical details of HTML and CSS, tweaking your blog's look isn't easy. Being able to easily pick a style from a rich library of choices is essential.

So, we made the move in Movable Type 3.2 to a new set of Six Apart standard styles that are shared with both our TypePad and LiveJournal services. There's an immediate benefit of being able to use any one of a number of existing styles. But in the future, with over ten million blogs sharing the same single set of styles and markup, there's going to be a new and rapidly expanding base of additional styles available that we think is...

continue reading ...

One of Movable Type's biggest strengths is the platform's support for an unlimited number of weblogs. Once you've got a thriving community of bloggers creating entries and publishing their thoughts, though, it quickly becomes necessary to manage the weblogs on your system.

To meet this need, we've introduced an entire new area of functionality in Movable Type 3.2: The System Overview. We've chosen the System Overview as the first feature to highlight in this new release because it represents a single home for administrators. It's one place to go to oversee everything that's happening across your installation, whether that's a single blog for your site, dozens of blogs managing...

continue reading ...

Before you install Movable Type there are three fundamental questions you need to ask yourself, 1) should you really be using Movable Type as your blogging software?, 2) do you have everything you need to use Movable Type? and 3) should you do the install yourself or should you pay someone else to do it?

1. Should you really be using Movable Type?

As weblogs gain more public visiblity, more and more people are setting up their own blogs. Many turn to Movable Type as it is one of the more established and powerful tools available. Movable Type however requires much more technical expertise than hosted blog services such as Typepad and Blogger. The first requirement is that you know...

continue reading ...

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...

continue reading ...

I'm really excited to be able to finally post about our new version of Movable Type and the innovative way we are launching it.

As I said in my previous post to Mena's Corner, the plugin and developer community is one of Movable Type's greatest strengths. This is a sentiment we've seen echoed around the Movable Type community, as well, along with the question: if Six Apart recognizes that the developer community is one its strengths, what are they doing to foster that community?

I addressed some of what we're doing in my previous post, but I want to expand on that.

As I said above, today, we'll be releasing the Developer Release of Movable Type 3.0.

It will be available to...

continue reading ...

Movable Type 3.2 features a new take on an old friend: the Junk folder. In your email program, some messages are likely to be spam, and most email applications these days offer a folder that can be set to delete junk after a set period of time.

We've brought the same convenience and power to Movable Type. Using the new feedback scoring system described earlier, comments or TrackBacks that fall below your spam threshold score can be set to be automatically deleted after a configurable period of time. (The default is 14 days.) The best part about the new junk folder? You don't have to touch it. If you just want to accept the default settings and not mess with junk comments or TrackBacks...

continue reading ...

For a lot of bloggers, participating in a community online is what motivates us and keeps us blogging. Good feedback from commenters and people sending TrackBacks can keep a weblog alive and vibrant, but negative comments or, worst of all, the plague of spam, can take all the satisfaction out of maintaining a blog.

Because nothing's more frustrating than spammers or trolls ruining your community, we've tried to make sure you have strong anti-spam tools out of the box in this new version of Movable Type. But eliminating the annoyance of spam is where the new community management features start, not where they end. So, we've made a powerful new Feedback Rating System in Movable Type 3.2....

continue reading ...

02.17.2003

Text Formatting Plugins Available

As we mentioned in our original post on Text Formatting, we hoped that Text Formatting plugins would make it easier for non-technical users to author and format weblog content. We released 2.6 just last week, and already plugin developers have implemented some exciting new Text Formatting options: • Timothy Appnel released a beta of his TikiText text formatting. • Brad Choate released version 1.1 of his Textile plugin. • Gregor Purdy released a POD text formatting text formatting plugin. • And, since we forgot to mention it previously, Adam Kalsey released MovableJive, a "port of some classic text filters".

Posted by Benjamin Trott at...

continue reading ...

Tutorials in Alphabetical Order

"Email Me" Contact Forms A Safe Way to Upgrade to MT 3.2 Add Your Links Here Adding a Footer Adding a Sidebar - MT3.1 and Earlier Adding a Sidebar to the Default Archive Templates Alphabetize Your Entries Amazon Web Services An Overview of the MT Program File Directories Applying MT3 Style Templates to MT2.X Background Patterns Backing Up Your Blog Banner Images Blog Maintenance Blogger Audioblogging with Movable Type CGIWrap and suEXEC Category Archive Pages Category Customizations Closing Comments Colors - Background, Banner, Headline, and Font Colors - Experimenting With, Using MTSetVar and MTGetVar Combining Multiple Blogs Into One Concerning Spam Converting from Fixed to Fluid Style...

continue reading ...

Except when you're writing or editing entries, much of the time spent in Movable Type is in managing the listings of entries, comments, TrackBacks, authors, or other items in the system. In past versions, listings could be inconsistent, with listings offering varying degrees of control, and the arrangement of information on some pages being frustrating. Worse, when the same type of information was listed in two different places, it wasn't always the same. For example, the comment listings page and the display of comments on an individual entry worked in completely different ways.

Every listing page improved

With Movable Type 3.2, we've made some massive improvements to the way that...

continue reading ...

Introduction

This article explains how you can customize the user interface of the Movable Type application. This is a powerful area of functionality that's easy to get started with and almost unlimited in its potential.

Some key points we'll cover: • How to create custom application templates for Movable Type's interface • The benefits of using application templates • Ideas for how to use application templates with your plugins or workflow • Links to some example application templates, to see what's possible and to inspire your own

Customizing the Movable Type user interface

To understand the potential of customizing your Movable Type interface, you'll need a little bit of background....

continue reading ...

We have just released Movable Type v3.14 which fixes the issue of extreme loads witnessed on servers under the strain of a massive spam attack. Because these attacks are increasing in both frequency and severity, we strongly recommend that all Movable Type users install this update. This is particularly important for any installation that is visible to the public on the web.

This release is a free update for Movable Type v3.x users and has been thoroughly tested both in-house, by our ProNet members and also by many of the web hosting companies initially affected by the problem. If you already purchased Movable Type or downloaded the free version, you’ll be able to download...

continue reading ...

Last week, CSS guru Eric Meyer posted his system called S5, a simple and elegant way to publish an XHTML file that can be displayed by any modern browser as a slideshow.

Using his primer and a little bit of custom templating in Movable Type, it's easy to create a template that can show your recent blog posts as a slideshow. (If you just want to jump to a live example, you can view the Professional Network blog as a slideshow.)

The key to making S5-compatible slideshows in Movable Type is to create a template that generates output with the appropriate markup to work with the CSS and Javascript that S5 requires. Here's the simple template we're using on the Professional Network: • <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">...

continue reading ...

Installing Movable Type with FTP

Problem

You want to install the Movable Type software using FTP.

Solution

Download an FTP application, uncompress the software onto your desktop and take care of any necessary configuration before uploading.

Discussion

• An FTP (file transfer protocol) program is used to send the files from your computer to your server. If you don't yet have an FTP program, there are many available for free. SmartFTP is a good FTP program for Windows, and offers a free trial version. Transmit is a good FTP program for Mac users on OS X, and it has a free...

continue reading ...

We are pleased to announce that the release of Movable Type 3.2 is nearly upon us. Feature development for this version was driven almost entirely by requests from our community of users and, therefore, the changes are tightly focused around the way you use the software. Overall, Movable Type 3.2 makes all the common tasks we perform with Movable Type much more satisfying.

Between now and the time it is released, we will be covering "Our 32 Favorite features in Movable Type 3.2" on the Professional Network weblog. Though we'll only be covering highlights of the new version, this release features over 100 new features and improvements. We're sure all users will find this to...

continue reading ...

Via PhotoMatt I found a very interesting comments thread on what is basically an argument of Movable Type vs. WordPres. Now everyone knows that I worship Movable Type, but I wish to voice some thoughts on this topic.

Movable Type and Wordpress are aimed at completely different audiences. If you upgraded to MT 3.0 you would have seen that the title was no longer "MOVABLE TYPE :: Personal Publishing System" but now was "Movable Type Publishing Platform." As can be seen from this post at Mena's Corner

One final thing. You'll notice that we're no longer describing Movable Type as a "Personal Publishing System" -- we now call it a "Publishing Platform." While "personal" remains a major...

continue reading ...

If you are experiencing intermittent "500 Server Errors" while using Movable Type and are using MySQL for your database, we are aware of the cause of the problem: a nightly cPanel update of a buggy version of the DBI and DBD::MySQL drivers. See this post on the Professional Network Weblog for more details.

The MT engineering team has been actively working with developer to help him rectify the problem. We apologize for any inconvenience and will keep you up to date on our progress as well as post here when the problem is solved.

UPDATE (Jul 6th, 2005 11pm PST): The developer of the DBD::MySQL driver reports that he has discovered the source of the problem (with the help of our own Brad Choate) and...

continue reading ...