It’s been a bit quiet around here as I took some needed time off in Indonesia, Connecticut and St. Joseph’s Medical Center in Pennsylvania. (That last one will take some explaining in a personal blog post when I get a chance.)
Before I resume my regular blogging activities here I thought I’d recap some of the noteworthy MT happenings that went down over the past couple of months.
The most significant is the official release of MT 4.2 and the inclusion of the Community Solution with all paid licenses. This community-enabled version has been dubbed Movable Type Pro. MT 4.2 was primarily focused on performance improvements through code optimization, caching, and some smart interface tweaks. The TypePad AntiSpam was later added. The bundling of the Community Solution was a welcome surprise and one that takes MT into something more than just a blogging or simple CMS platform. I highly recommend all users upgrade to this version. It’s really worth it no matter what your situation.
DevLounge coverage is here including some gotchas to upgrading. We also suggest you read up on What’s New, the performance enhancements and how you can take advantage of them in your system. Also be sure to read the MT 4.2 upgrade guide before attempting to do so.
More here from the Industry Standard on the MT 4.2 release
I was involved in a discussion about the future of the MTOS code based and posted an initial plan to the MT wiki. This is something I need to find the time to return to in order to further.
A number of new and interesting plugins have been released.
Byrne Reese released two plugins that Six Apart have been using. Forum Utilities adds features such as promoting comment to an entry, highlighting comments, and closing conversations quickly and easily from the MT interface. This is particularly timely given the wider availability of community features in MT.
The other plugin, SuperPage, from MT’s esteemed product manager, was developed to aid Six Apart’s own documentation efforts and converts a single, massive MT page into a set of easy to navigate pages divided into chapter and section.
For all those wishing to produce a simple iPhone-compatible version of their site, Taichi Kaminogoya has released an iPhone Template Set for MT, that gives you the basics and a good jumping off point for something more sophisticated and customized.
Six Apart and JumpBox have announced the release of Virtual Movable Type.
Six Apart writes “the virtual appliance automatically installs Movable Type and all necessary infrastructure on a single virtual machine, thus eliminating the complex task of configuring server applications.” Jesse Gardner of PlasticMind weighs in here as does WebMonkey here and InfoWorld.
Back in early August, Yahoo announced that their formerly experimental geolocation platform FireEagle was now officially opening up to all users. In the announcement it was noted that MT “will get automatic location reporting for its authors and in its Action Stream service.” Sounds interesting and I look forward to seeing what becomes of that collaboration.
Six Apart’s David Recordon announced on the mtos-dev mailing list that the OpenID 2 branch that that has been under development has been merged in the MTOS core trunk now. You can count on those features showing up in the next major release of MT.
Six Apart engineer Beau Smith ported the Sandbox semantic template set framework for MT. Beau has also been hard at work on Vanilla that “provides various template sets which only contain the code necessary to show a specific feature in Movable Type. These template sets are not intended to be used for publishing your blog, but rather to be used for learning how to add a particular feature.” Learning about MT’s default templates and features? Start with Vanilla and start working your way through the ever improving documentation.
Speaking of template sets, Six Apart’s Jim Ramsey released the elegant Mid Century template set for MT. I love it and it has lots of potential for being tweaked and customized for your own uses. (My gold standard for any template set.) Anil Dash has already done so on his personal blog.
Last, but not least Arvind is back to writing his Movable Type Monday articles for the Blog Herald — well at least for a couple of weeks he was. College students. What can you do. The last two releases are here and here. Arvind’s articles are always essential reading (when he’s not cramming for an exam or traveling) for keeping up on the great work the MT community is doing.
Lots of good stuff and more to come.
We now return to our regular blog programming.
