MT Tab Sweep: January 2008 Edition
Using an Offline Editor to Post to Your Blog Chad writes-up a nice overview (albeit Windows-centric) of using an external editor like Ecto or BlogJet with MT. The state of blogs and external editors is still kind of rocky though. AtomPub was recently made an IETF standard and has yet to make it ways into deployments. MT 4.1 introduces AtomPub 1.0 support though. Previous interfaces based on XML-RPC are a horrendously flawed mess. Though they shouldn’t have to care, sometimes technical details to indirectly impact users.
A Better Movable Type QuickPost I’ve been aware of the QuickPost bookmarklet in MT for years, but it never quite did it for me like my GmailThis! and post to del.icio.us bookmarklet. (Perhaps this is why I don’t bog nearly as much I use those sevices.) This post discusses how you can create your own.
MT Security Update for MT 3.3x and MT 4 Announced Last week Six Apart released security updates for MT 4 and MT 3.3. Having review the potential exploit the update addresses I have to agree with Su when he says “The issue itself isn’t too likely and hasn’t been discovered in the wild, but it’s always a good idea to apply any security patches, of course.”
Movable Type 4.1 Almost Here In the past couple of weeks we’ve seen a pair of release candidates from Six Apart for the latest MT, version 4.1. An announcement has not been made to the MT blog, but RC2 is available for download and expected to be the last before the official release.
Universal Template Set Jim Ramsey with help from Byrne Reese, both Six Apart employees, released a plugin that provides a template set for publishing a traditional web site using Movable Type that they call the “Universal Template Set.” Byrne did a nice screencast of what this plugin can do for your MT system. This is quite nice thing and a good step in the right direction that speaks to the power and flexibility of MT. I think the name does it a bit of a disservice though. (The use of “turnkey” in the announcement may be overselling things like the initial Podcast support in MT4, but I’m going to let that slide for now.)
When I first took a look I was under a different impression to what it was based on the name. “Universal” implies “for all uses” so I was expecting to see a bare bones set of MT templates in which other template sets could be built. It’s not though so I think there will be some confusion and skewed expectations. “Classic Website Template Set” would be more appropriate and clearer. It’s just semantics, but in my experience is that it’s enough to confuse and perhaps even annoy users.
Criticisms aside, this really is a good and welcome thing. I like the overall look of the default templates more then what’s been shipping with MT.
What’s (still) sorely missing is any type of documentation for building your own sets and styles. Arguably that is not the purpose of this plugin, but as the first of its kind and being released by two members of Six Apart’s staff I’d expect to see an effort like this serve a text book example for future development. It’s not really and that makes it an opportunity missed — at least so far.
With the changes made going from the MT 3.x default templates to what shipped with MT4, everything in the MT Style Gallery is broken when applied to default templates in MT4. (I’ve been mildly surprised there hasn’t been more of an uproar — not like the MT community needs another.) My concern is that without documentation — and some assurance this isn’t going to happen any time soon — there will few, if any, third-party template sets for users to choose from.
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