Movable Type 4.2 - Faster, Prettier and Nearly Ready

By Irina Guseva (@irina_guseva) Jul 28, 2008

From 4.0 in the summer of 2007 to 4.1 in early 2008, Six Apart is about to grace us with yet another shiny and new version of Movable Type sometime this summer. While the exact release date has not yet been revealed — think early August — the 4.2 version looks like something worth the wait. The suspense is further fueled by the MT team’s bold comments revolving around the statement that this is “one of the most important upgrades to Movable Type ever.”

As Byrne Reese, Six Apart’s Product Manager, puts it “Movable Type 4.2 includes compelling solutions to the three most frequently requested features by our users: amazing performance enhancements, vastly simpler templates and design capabilities.”

Performance and Publishing Enhancements

MT is now faster and more scalable than ever with several changes that increase publishing speed and reduce memory load. Extensive code audit led to some of the improvements outlined below. The good thing is that none of the improvements will require you to make any template or configuration changes when you upgrade to 4.2.

This is the biggest highlight of 4.2, according to Reese, who quite poetically describes it as “You know that feeling when you buy a new computer and you see the boot-up screen whiz by really fast. It’s a rush right? That the sensation you get when you publish in Movable Type 4.2.”

Module Caching

The HTML output from the most widely used templates can now be cached to speed up the publishing process and improve database performance.

Movable Type 4.2 Module Caching Configuration

For a more detailed overview of Module Caching, go here.

Server Side Includes (SSI)

In the new version, you can process template modules as SSI’s. What that means is that you can share the same content and code among multiple pages and update all of them at the same time on publish, without having to republish the entire site.

In other words, as soon as the MT sees , it will process it as an SSI, write the HTML output to the file system and replace the tag with the appropriate server side include.

Currently, MT 4.2 supports the following types of SSI:

PHP
SHTML
ASP
JSP

Publishing

As we already know, Movable Type supports dynamic, static and background publishing right out-of-the-box. In 4.2, there is a series of publishing enhancements designed to optimize site and database performance by publishing high-priority content statically while less important content is published dynamically or via background.

Publishing Profile Wizard in Movable Type 4.2

Fine tuning is now also a possibility, as every template and archive map can be configured independently.

New in Design and Templating

Updated Navigation

To make the use of MT as efficient as possible, 4.2 introduces a fresh look at navigation and menus structure, including the improved Preferences menu and additions to the Tools menu.

New Movable Type 4.2 navigation