Code / Appnel Solutions 

On MT's resiliency when "getting Dugg"

sarahintampa wants to move off of TypePad and is trying to decided if MT4 is right for her. In posting her thoughts she writes:

I read somewhere that if you get Dugg, your MT site stays up and your WP site goes down…something to do with the database…? Anyone who can explain this, please comment!

This comes up frequently enough that I thought I would post it here for the benefit of others and my own future reference. What follows is a lightly edited version of the comment I made.

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More Details on MT v4.1 "Boomer" and MTOS

Earlier today a lot of information was publicly disclosed on the ProNet conference call by Product Manager Byrne Reese as to the next release of Movable Type (MT) version 4.1 also known as “Boomer”, and MTOS, the open source GPL licensed version announced last June. What follows comes from the rough notes I took during the call with a bit of commentary from me.

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Crafty Template Variable Tricks

As someone who's been coding for more then half his life, I often have the inclination to take an approach to a problem most others cannot. I'm well aware, often painfully so, that the what I can do is not understood or accessible by others. I really try to remember this daily in everyone I deal with, but despite my best intentions occasionally I unwittingly overlook the easiest answer for what is easy and routine for me.

Two recent instances came across my screen where the solution was so simple and straight-forward I completely overlooked them.

One such instance was the use of the core mt:if and mt:unless conditional tags with a single template variable to create a generic header and footer tags for any and all loops that Su of House Pretty devised. Rather then repeat it here, I'll give Su the link and let you go and bask in it's crafty brilliance.

Another came from the MT Community Forums, where Milohoss presented the problem generating an XML file that had to output a <MT> tag. (Changing the MT tag was not an option.) With this problem he was experiencing, the template engine mistook it as a template tag and generated an error when it recognize it. When Su flagged it on the mt-dev mailing list, I immediately jumped in and suggested a quick plugin to output the MT tag. That would have worked, but David from Six Apart support intervened and suggested using variable tags instead.

<MTSetVar name="mt_text" value="MT">
<<$MTGetVar name="mt_text"$>>KEYWORDS HERE</<$MTGetVar name="mt_text"$>>

It's a little bit had on the eye, but that doesn't matter because it solves the problem immediately and in a way that anyone could do it. There is no need to write a pluginas I had suggested. It will even work in MT 3.3 and MT 4. Brilliant!

The MT Community Solution

I should have waited another day before I posted my Newsworthy Link Dump last week. The following day, Six Apart announced the release of their Community Solution for MT.

As most Six Apart announcements, it got picked up by a number of tech news sources like TechCrunch and CNet.

I thought it kind of odd how these articles pidgeon-holed the Community Solution as forums. The Community Solution does indeed provided the ability to host forums using the MT engine, but it does a lot more too.

The screenscast on the Community Solution product page does a good job of explaining all that the community pack can do in a short period of time. CMSWire did a more through review here. Also, Jesse Gardner of PlasticMind posted his first impression of the Community Solutions.

Prior to the release of the Community Solution, MT Product Manger, Byrne Reese posted a summary to one of the semi-public MT venues the community frequents. (I recall where I got this from now.) It’s the best textual summary I’ve seen encountered and thought I would re-post it here.

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On iMT and a Lightweight MT Interface for the Desktop

This is a bit of a thought piece I've been meaning to write up for some time, that brings together two different seemingly different events -- that is until Anil Dash posed an interesting idea.

Back in September, not long after MT4 and the iPhone shipped, Six Apart announced the release of iMT, a plugin specially designed user interface for Movable Type 4.0 users to access their installation via their iPhone or iPod Touch.

About the same time, over on the ProNet mailing list, a somewhat heated discussion of the merits and demerits (mostly the demerits) regarding the new interface unveiled in MT4. The complaints where varied and at times conflicting (go figure), but for the most part I categorize them as the new interface being:

• Too heavy -- the MT4 uses is too much CSS and JavaScript files.
• Too busy -- the MT4 interface is too colorful, hard on the eyes, over done, gradients suck, icons not clear etc. etc.

There is a lot of good in the new interface, but there is some credence to the gripes that were aired. I admit to contributing some of them.

Long into the conversation, Anil Dash asked if anyone had tried using iMT as a basic lightweight interface for everyday authors.

An interesting thought! I had not tried and though my wife owns an iPod Touch chances are I'd have to peel it from her dead fingers to use it. (I jest, but you get the idea.)

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Thank you, sir, may I have another?

A few weeks ago Todd Cochrane, had a hissy fit about some podcasting issues he had with MT. I weighed in and Movable Type PM Byrne Reese came to the rescue with a Podcasting plugin for MT4 in record time. The ever astute Su of House of Pretty fame did some good analysis on Cochrane’s claim that the Enclosure plugin doesn’t work in MT4 that indicate that the plugin does work contrary to Cochrane’s claims. So while Six Apart’s Pocasting support was perhaps overstated and certainly could have been better, his rant was mostly based on operator error. Nice.

Quick to judgement, Cochrane was slow to acknowledge the work, but he eventually did.

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Movable Type Newsworthy Link Dump, Nov. 2007

I haven’t been blogging as much as I’d like these past 2 weeks. Let’s start again with a bit of a link dump of important announcements that the MT community will want to note.

Movable Type Open Source (MTOS) and MT 4.1

Some blogs picked up on a comment posted on a comment posted on the original announcement of an open source MT (MTOS) by Byrne Reese, Product Manager for Movable Type. Byrne commented:

this is our current thinking:

• What will be MTOS will be available from subversion this month (November 2007) - actually MT 4.01 is available from svn now at code.sixapart.com/svn/movabletype/branches/athena
• The first release of MTOS will then be in December to coincide with the release of the next version of MT.
• The feature set of MTOS will be that of MT4.0. There will be no feature in MT4 that will be removed from MTOS.

The Subversion repository Byrne mentions did indeed go live. I’ve already setup a working copy from the repository on my work machine.

While more progress, however slow, is good news to hear. “z-master” nails what is most exciting:

Now it looks like new idea is not to remove anything from open source, but instead add something to commercial version!.

This is great news for users and perhaps open source developers as a whole. I’m still left a bit uneasy and wondering about the community (anyone working with MT) and its role. Will Six Apart still dictate the features and direction of the MT core even once licensed under the GPL or will the community have equal share. Speaking personally I will be rather disappointed if the community’s role is to clean-up code and write documentation. I’ve known the Six Apart since, well before they were Six Apart, and I know their intentions are good and in the right place. Good intentions can go awry though, so I’m admittedly a bit anxious.

Not up to speed on all of this MT and open source talk? Jesse Gardner of Plastic Mind wrote a wonderful post on the very topic: Five Things You Need To Know About Movable Type Open Source.

OpenSocial

MTOS and MT 4.1 wasn’t the only exciting news out of Six Apart. A consortium of companies lead by Google along with Six Apart and other companies like MySpace and Ning.

Six Apart is closely tied to this effort with former Chief Architect and LiveJournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick leading the effort for Google and Six Apart’s own David Recordon being closely involved.

I’m still getting my head wrapped around the details, but the overall concept sounds great even if its nascent or, dare I say, “vaporware” at the moment. Execution and evolution is a matter for time to work out. Many blog posts abound on the topic for me to take in. Here are a few good starting points:

• Google Aims to Break Open the Closed World of Social Networking [Wired]
• OpenSocial [Google Code]
• OpenSocial, Killer Apps and Regular People [Six Apart]

UPDATE: Catching up on my reading I caught this interesting and amusing passage from a post on OpenSocial by Tim O’Reilly:

I think Amazon is the only company that really understands that we’re in the process of building an internet operating system … (I take that back. I think SixApart gets it. Hmmm…Amazon ought to buy SixApart, purely for the social networking API play, and do it right….)

Defensio

Word made it around the ProNet list that Montreal-based Karabunga had launched Defensio “a spam filtering web service that you can use to protect your blog or web application from comment spam.” Automattic, the company behind the pioneering comment spam filtering service Akismet, welcomed the competition.

Being the developer that was commissioned to develop MT-Akismet, I volunteered to develop a MT plugin for the service. The services generally work in similar ways that I can adapt the code rather then reinvent the wheel. Now I just need make a few blog posts and sort out all of the enthusiasm.

I’ll leave the comparison of the two services for a later date; however, I will say my first impression is that Defensio is more polished all around. (They taken advantage of their second-mover advantage.) One significant difference is that, Defensio provides a rating of “spamminess” to applications while Akismet is simply boolean — spam or ham. The debate to which is better has already begun on ProNet and I’m sure elsewhere. Ultimately the proof will be in how it performs. I for one think all of this is good.