Movable Type 3.3 and Enterprise Ships
Six Apart has officially announced the release Movable Type 3.3 and Movable Type Enterprise for general usage.
This release features hundreds of improvements in usability and performance from the previous release of Movable Type, version 3.2. While there are a number of significant features in these releases, it's really all of the little subtle refinements that make this release shine. Take for instance these type of usability improvements:
- Users are now warned about unsaved changes before navigating their browser away from an entry or template.
- The text area used for entering the content of an entry are resizable.
- Users can empty their junk comments and TrackBack pings with one click.
It's this incorporation of customer feedback and attention to detail that makes Movable Type such a great tool.
Enterprise and 3.3 is not just a release of small refinements though. These new releases debut a number of significant new features.
Users can now "tag" entries for more effective searches. A tag is a keyword or descriptive term associated with an item as means of classification. Tagging (the action of associating tags with an online resource) have been made popular by sites such as del.icio.us or Flickr. This functionality is quite similar our Tags.App plugin. (For more on the future of Tags.App and its roadmap see this post.) Tags are valuable because it enables a more fine-grained and flexible means of categorization that can assist in later retrieval of content from a large collection of content.
The system can now be monitored and managed using syndication feeds. These feeds are secured and allow action to be taken right from an aggregator. The company has given this functionality the name Activity Feeds. Activity feeds can include system errors, author logins, entry posts and comments submissions to name some of the information that can be viewed. This is particularly valuable for those running large or high-volume weblogs. Administrators don't need not have their browser open to the MT administration interface in order to monitor and respond to system events -- all they need is an aggregator. Activity Feeds also provide an alternate means to comment and TrackBack ping notifications via email.
MT now has a built-in system for periodically executing tasks without the use of Unix tools such as cron. Tasks can be used to publish a schedule entry, close inactive comments or update a syndication feeds on a page. The Task Manager works without cron by checking its queue of tasks each time an Activity Feed is generated and running any tasks that are ready to be run. While this is helpful for users who did not have the access or knowledge to use cron there is still some benefit to those who do -- periodic tasks can be plugins. Prior to this release administrators would have to create an cron entry for each task they wanted to run. Now these useful routines can be installed by dropping some code into the plugins directory.
The system comes with a plugin for publishing syndication feeds in weblogs. We admit to being a bit biased on this since we built it for Six Apart, but we think that its a very useful feature with a lot of potential to easily integrate content from disparate sources. Feeds.App Lite is not enough for you? Try Feeds.App.
This release also comes with a number of other new and improved plugins. Our favorite is the Widget Manager which let's you select and order modules of template markup using a drag-and-drop interface. While already a valuable tool, we think it is just scratching the surface of its potential to revolutionize how templates are built.
We're glad to see more of functionality being introduced through plugins. Not because we're plugin developers, but because plugins give the system more flexibility to be adapted. This is critical in our view as the uses for MT broaden. It can't be all things to all users as one piece of software. By developing a core and then mixing and matching plugins MT will be able to be serve the needs of its widening user base.
Six Apart announced their intentions to release a version of MT specifically targeted at supporting the needs of the enterprise. Movable Type Enterprise includes all the features found in the MT 3.3 release along with support for Oracle 10g, LDAP and bulk author functions suited for managing large number of authors. Enterprise licensees are provided high-priority enterprise-level support services. It's a good first step, but much more is needed.
The changes and features lists for both MT 3.3 and Enterprise is much more extensive then what we've covered here, but hopefully you get the idea.
This is all very exciting and a worthwhile upgrade, but some words of caution must be given. Read this information before upgrading. Also because of the rapid public beta testing cycle most plugins (We're not the only plugin developers trying to catch up) have been fully tested or upgraded for this new release. If your MT installation relies on any plugins, please be sure to test them with MT 3.3 before putting the upgrade into production.
Considering Movable Type for your organization? Need help upgrading to MT 3.3? Not sure if Enterprise is the right choice for you? Contact us to discuss how we can help.
