06.30.2005

New in Movable Type 3.2: A home for administrators

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...

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Question

When installing Movable Type (or trying to access the Configuration Menu for the Nofollow plugin in a version prior to 3.2), I receive an error saying Your DataSource directory does not exist.

Answer

Error occurs during installation

First, make sure you have created a folder named db, and that you have set its permissions to the equivalent of chmod 777 (if you are not running under cgiwrap or suexec).

Then, make sure you've specified the full server path1 for the DataSource setting in mt-config.cgi2. For example: DataSource...

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3.2 (2005.08.25)

Major Features

• New dead-simple AJAX-powered installation/upgrade process (see screencast demo) which replaces mt-load.cgi and all mt-upgrade* scripts. Also eliminated the upgrade distribution since only the config file would be different. • Combined mt.cfg and mt-db-pass.cgi into mt-config.cgi. Shipping as mt-config.cgi-original so as to prevent overwriting when upgrading. • Introduced the new System Overview section which allows administrators to configure and manage aspects of the system across all weblogs • Introduced a plugin-based feedback rating framework which scores comments and TrackBacks upon submission on a scale from -10 (least desirable) to 10 (most desirable)...

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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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01.31.2005

BlogBinders: Publish your blog in print

If you're looking for a way to hold your blog in your hands, BlogBinders.com offers a simple and clever service to turn your blog into an attractive, customized book. BlogBinders supports LiveJournal, Movable Type, and TypePad.

Posted by Anil in Web Services at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Trackback (0)

01.31.2005

Gawker launches Lifehacker and Gridskipper

Gawker Media's just added two new Movable Type-powered weblogs to its media empire, as announced by Nick Denton. Lifehacker is a friendly geek site and Gridskipper is a travel site aiming for selectivity.

Posted by Anil in New Sites at 10:45 AM | Permalink |...

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Updated. Originally posted January 4, 2004.

If you are interested in driving more traffic to your blog, the first thing you should do is create useful, compelling content. The next thing you should do is make sure that content is easily found in search results from search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Movable Type does a few things automatically that are very helpful to getting ranked higher in search engines. For example, Google likes pages that are well structured, with header and title tags, and with lots of text. The default templates in MT ensure that the pages of your blog are well structured with H1, H2, and H3 header tags, and even title tags that include the name of...

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04.28.2005

Blogs as a complement to newspapers

Forbes online picked up an Associated Press story about the eleven blogs being published by the editorial staff of the News & Record in North Carolina.

The broad range of Movable Type-powered blogs have earned high praise from others in the journalism business. As Editor & Publisher said:

"When the paper's overhaul is complete, it may be a model for the sort of 21st century paper that many journalism big thinkers have been talking about, chewing over, and confabbing on for the last few years," wrote the industry-watching magazine Editor & Publisher. "Greensboro will be the first place where this conceptually...

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This section of the appendix details all configuration directives that can be defined in mt-config.cgi. Through use of these directives, you can control numerous aspects of the system.

Except for those which define things specific to your system (e.g. CGIPath and your database settings), all of them have defaults set by Movable Type. This means that not every directive will appear in mt-config.cgi. If you wish to override the default for a setting which does not appear in the file, simply add it and the desired value to your mt-config.cgi.

...

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The Washington Post has just launched Achenblog, their new TypePad-powered weblog by Post Magazine columnist Joel Achenbach. The launch was accompanied by a chat with Achenbach about the new site.

Trackbacks:

Previous Entry: Introduction to Nofollow

Next Entry: Improvements to TypePad Mixed Media Templates

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Doug Bowman of StopDesign has posted an in-depth tutorial, complete with downloadable templates and screenshots of the end result, explaining how to create a beautiful and functional photo gallery using Movable Type. The results are astounding.

It's nice to see that one of the tools used to help build the gallery is Photon, which Doug discovered here on the Professional Network. We've also got an overview post listing techniques for working with photos in Movable Type.

Trackbacks:

Previous Entry: Converting Manila to Movable Type

Next Entry: Introduction to Nofollow

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Introduction

In order to provide extra functionality to Movable Type users not tied to normal release cycles and to provide solid examples for developers of use of the Plugin API and best Movable Type prorgamming practices, we will from time to time bundle plugins with Movable Type.

With Movable Type 3.2, there are three included plugins which we will detail in their own sections. • Nofollow • SpamLookup • Template Backup/Refresh

Like the Movable Type application, these plugins are supported by Six Apart. If you experience any problems using these plugins and you are a paid...

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Call it a late holiday gift or a great way to start the new year. In either case, we are pleased to offer you the Six Apart Guide for Fighting Comment Spam (also available in PDF format).

The guide covers many of the concepts and tools available to fight comment spam and explains the strengths and weaknesses that we've seen of each. We also included our "best practices" recommendations for not only keeping spam off of your site, but making sure that you and your readers have the best possible experience. The document is intended to be a fairly comprehensive, living document which will change and grow over time to reflect the changing nature of the topic.

As I've mentioned before, Six...

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Question

I'm using some custom HTML inside an MTPings container, but the code disappears when the page is published.

Answer

Note: This issue has been resolved in version 3.17 (released on June 2, 2005), so upgrading will eliminate the need for the workaround shown below.

This is a Known Issue with the version of the Nofollow plugin released with 3.16. To work around this problem, disable Sanitize: <MTPings sanitize="0">

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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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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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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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As most of you know, simultaneous with the release of Movable Type 3.2, we introduced the new and vastly improved User Manual. The manual is built using Movable Type and offers to all of our customers not only an excellent search functionality but the ability to give feedback directly on every single item.

Of course, with any major change, there are always things that fall through the cracks and this was no exception. You let us know through the comments on the manual and many blog posts that the manual still needed some work. So a few weeks ago we rolled up our sleeves and got to work on filling in the gaps and fixing the problems you highlighted. We're now happy to say...

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3.17 (2005.06.02)

• Fixed problem where MT installs at the root of a domain would continually log out the user. • Fixed a bug in nofollow 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 are in use before conversion. • Fixed URL-encoding of uploaded file paths (e.g. images%2fbeach-pic.jpeg)

...

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04.15.2005

Workflow for Movable Type released

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...

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06.20.2005

UTF-8 Dirify bug and patch

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,...

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