As we've just announced, we'll be supporting the new rel="nofollow" attribute for comment and TrackBack links with our platforms.

With the introduction of the new spec, it's worth reviewing the initiative for Professional Network members who'd like an overview of the entire effort. • What is nofollow?

The HTML specification allows a tags for hyperlinks to include a rel attribute. This attribute is used to specify a link type describing the relationship between the document hosting the hyperlink and the document that is the target of the hyperlink. • Is this valid HTML?

Yup. Though the rel attribute has been relatively obscure (it's used in XFN and Technorati's tags, but...

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08.31.2004

Dynamic Template Tutorials

If you're working with Movable Type 3.1's new support for dynamic templates, you'll want to check out some of the great tutorials created by community members during the beta. Gregory Blake has a good overview and tbuddy digs into the details of updating your .htaccess, if necessary. Nice work, guys!

Posted by Anil in at 01:00 PM | Permalink | Trackback (0)

08.30.2004

Plugins Directory Relaunches

The Movable Type Plugins Directory has relaunched as an official Six Apart website, featuring a whole new look, a simpler organization, and a list of plugins which have been tested with Movable Type 3.0.

Take a look through the 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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Here it is, folks. Workflow 1.0 is ready to go. The version I am releasing today is solely for personal use, and may be used as an evaluation version for commercial usage (but please limit the evaluation to 30 days or less). I am still finalizing the commercial license for this plugin, but I wanted to get a version of it out there while I finish up what is needed.

So, here is how to get your very own copy of Workflow. Download one of the following archives and unpack it in the main directory of your Movable Type installation. It will install files into the plugins/Workflow/ directory, and you will need to make sure that workflow.cgi has the correct permissions to execute as a...

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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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Question

What is Movable Type?

Answer

Movable Type is the premier weblog publishing platform for businesses, organizations, developers, and web designers. The application is installed on your web server, and is flexible and appropriate for use by web developers, professionals, organizations or businesses with customization needs. For a simpler start to weblogs, you can try our TypePad service, which includes many of Movable Type’s features on a centrally hosted server that requires no configuration.

For more information on the features and...

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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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Amazon DevCon is an event Amazon is hosting for their internal developers. The Amazon Web Services Developer Relations Team is live-blogging this excellent series of presentations on their Amazon Web Services Blog, which is powered by TypePad. There's also a Japanese version of the AWS blog.

The transcripts being posted are a must-read if you want to hear from the technologists who are influencing Amazon's developers. Niall Kennedy has collected some great excerpts from the presentations.

And if you're looking for a cool way to make use of Amazon's web services within Movable Type, the BookQueueToo plugin discussed earlier this week shows some best practices for integrating AWS into...

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Movable Type uses an entry's title for creating the individual archive filename. However, umlauts are not supported very well. But it would be a good feature, if the two-character substitutes (for example "ae" instead of "ä") were used in naming the file.

The dirifyplus Plugin

In Filename with Underscore or Dash? I described the dirifyplus Plugin and showed, how it can be used for creating Google-friendly filenames. The plugin just has the small disadvantage: umlauts are not supported.

The source code for the plugin is available. I do not know Perl at all, but as a software developer this task can certainly be solved.

Extending the Plugin

Open the file...

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I was reading through MT Plus Comment Spam Equals Dead Site again (an interesting read), which prompted me to consider many of the points within. For those who don't know, this post, along with the activity that generated it, was a big part of the reason behind the development of MT-Approval. I was doing it anyway, but that forced the issue to happen a bit faster.

Much of the problem that happened at the time was the sheer load that was generated by Movable Type, even with MT-Blacklist installed, and even in instances where the comment was moderated. These issues were addressed with an update to Movable Type and also through a later release of the MT-Blacklist software, but the general...

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Sometimes development trends are worth the hype. If you've been itching to play around with the AJAX approach to web applications, you'll want to grab the SAJAX Toolkit. It's PHP-only for right now, but it gives you a robust set of tools for getting started with much richer web applications. SAJAX is BSD licensed, making it fair game for your apps even if you want to charge for them, and there's a donation link so you can support its further development.

If you do dig into AJAX functionality, be sure to check out these XMLHttpRequest usability guidelines for some best practices on how to make sure your gee-whiz features meet your users' expectations.

Trackbacks:

a work on...

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Award-winning Movable Type plugin developer Tim Appnel's just launched a new code section on his Appnel Internet Solutions site, where he's launched a number of powerful new plugins and updated a bunch of his existing plugins.

Among the new releases is Feeds.App, a complete rewrite of the popular mt-rssfeed plugin, with a host of new features and an updated user interface that integrates directly into Movable Type.

In addition to the new plugins, which are available in a variety of licenses ranging from free, to free for personal use with a donation suggested, to a paid license for commerical uses which includes support, Tim's linked to his contributions to CPAN, where he's been...

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I'm very happy to announce that this afternoon we released Movable Type 3.1.

What you're seeing with Movable Type 3.1 is a free update that comes a little over three months from our last release. When we made our licensing and pricing changes one of the things we didn't articulate clearly enough was that it takes revenue to keep a product line going. And, with the new pricing we have been able to spend a great deal of attention focusing on the features we've heard our users asking for in our products.

Sure, some Movable Type users migrated to other tools. And, of course, it is sad to see them leave. However, we feel strongly that the Movable Type community (and Six Apart as a...

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Installing Movable Type on Windows

Problem

You want to run Movable Type on a Windows system.

Solution

Movable Type has been developed to run on a wide variety of operating systems including Windows, although this entails some additional considerations.

Discussion

One of Movable Type's strengths as a platform is that it runs in a wide variety of environments, letting you choose the operating system, web server, and database. As a Perl-based application though, Movable Type has historically been most at home on Unix-based operating systems like Linux, BSDs, or Mac OS X.

If you have chosen Windows as...

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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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Categories provide an alternate means to the weblog's traditional chronological form of organizing entries. Movable Type allows you to enter a list of categories using a variety of methods and assign one or more to each of your entries. You can use MT's categorization facilities to group related entries despite chronology or simply as a means of filtering entry listings in the CMS more easily.

Each entry can be assigned one primary category and any number of secondary categories. The primary category is used when you wish to display information about just one of the categories to which an entry is...

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Ben and Mena are at center stage now, announcing the new Movable Type 3.1 product. It's scheduled to go into beta soon, and should be released next month. Ben said last night at the developer's dinner that it would be August 31 (cute again), but that date hasn't been mentioned again.

The first announcement is for post scheduling. You can create a post, then set it to be posted in the future. Once you do, the post will be automatically posted (presumably, the appropriate templates will be rebuilt) on the date and time you specify.

The next announcement is the addition of subcategories to the core MT code. David Raynes has been working with the folks at Six Apart to integrate his...

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Updated. Originally posted April 3, 2005.

If you are using a MySQL database and your blog is PHP enabled (see Converting to PHP), you can use PHP scripts to pull blog data from your database to add customizations to your blog. For example, say you would like to have on your sidebar a quote, randomly pulled from a selection of quotes, with a new quote displayed every time you refresh the page. You can accomplish this by creating a separate weblog for quotes, then using a simple PHP script to pull the data from your MySQL database, and using a PHP include to put the script results into your main weblog page.

PHP scripts are a level of difficulty up from Movable Type, and require...

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According to the MT Plugin pages, version 2.01b of MT Blacklist should be available - it's even claimed to be compatible with the latest version of MT.

Unfortunately the links only yield version 1.6.5 as of now.

A pity.

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If you're lazy like me, you'd like to link to Amazon items and put your associate ID in there, but who remembers that URL format? With publishing systems like Movable Type, you shouldn't have to remember, so let's make MT do the work for us.

Ingredients: • 1 MT-Macro plugin • 1 MT-IfEmpty plugin • 1 MT-Regex plugin

Technique:

Define a pattern to match the Amazon URL (today they use the www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/ASINCODE/… So we use this to transform the regular Amazon link into an associate link: <$MTSetVar name="amazon_id"...

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