Movable Type News & Articles

Welcome to July 2009 installment of our what's coming from the open source CMS projects in the next 30 days.

If you're looking through here and feel that your project was left out, we invite you to send us an email at pr@cmswire.com with a pointer to who we should contact at your project for updates.

Back in December 2007, Six Apart announced that the Movable Type (MT) blogging system was going open source. The move was greeted with enthusiasm, but the momentum never really seemed to build from that point. Now a group of ex-Six Apart staff and other MT enthusiasts have taken matters -- and the code -- into their own hands. Say hello to Open Melody. Let's have a look.

Following just days after the release of the optional Movable Type v4.26 release, Six Apart has announced another update to the blogging and social media platform. Apparently a few bugs and some performance related database schema changes slipped through the 4.26 cracks.

Key changes in version 4.261 include:

• The Schema Version is now updated to 4.00071, which was omitted in 4.26. This change will only affect users who have already upgraded to Movable Type 4.26, not those on 4.25 and below. The schema change adds indexes to several tables.
• A typo in a 4.26 commit where a user clicks the Cancel button on the Display Options flyout did not necessarily cancel the user's actions; the 4.261 fix corrects this behavior.
• Fixed the Schwartz (MT's job queuing system) error exposed as a result of a previous 4.26 commit: 'Can't call method "registry" on an undefined value at lib/MT/Component.pm line 558 during global destruction'.

Reminder: What You Got in v4.26

In case you missed our previous coverage, here's what came with the MT 4.26 update. Remember, this release was labeled as optional by Six Apart, but we'd say that it's a must have for anyone who's flexing the platform's muscle in a meaningful way.

Bug Fixes

Aside from resolving some bugs that got through the 4.25 QA process (or were deemed too insignificant), this release was all about improving existing features — no templates or plug-ins are affected. Breath sigh of relief now.

Probably one of the biggest crowd pleasers is a fix to how lists of articles were filtered by category name. Users can now parse categories within a mt:Entries tag that include whitespace or logical operators. This bug was actually introduced in version 4.25 and made a lot of people unhappy. So for much of the user base, this is a welcome update.

Here are a few more of the bug fixes (view them all here):

• Fixes to Backup and Restore
• Fixes to a bug where the comment response did not return users to the entry
• The method for parsing the categories within an mt:Entries tag has been fixed
• Security fix for mt-wizard.cgi (this is a non-critical security fix)

Performance Enhancements

Movable Type 4.26 is a recommended update for Enterprise 4.x customers is related to the performance fixes. Specifically, there are fixes to the database indices to improve query speed which should improve search significantly and improved reliability and performance of MT's open source job queuing system, TheSchwartz.

Other low-level changes that are said to improve performance include fixes to metadata saving and unnecessary reloading of the configuration while running MT under FastCGI.

Downloading the Update

You can download Movable Type 4.261 now, but as usual, make backups before applying any changes and read the release notes to make sure this is a fix you or your clients really need.

There's a new version of the Movable Type (news, site) publishing system out. This latest release from Six Apart fixes issues, offers performance improvements and ties up one small security hole. There are no new features, no big wow -- but there was a bit of applause for a much sought after bug fix.

Welcome to another installment of our what's coming from the open source CMS projects in the next 30 days.

If you're looking through here and feel that your project was left out, we invite you to send us an email at pr@cmswire.com with a pointer to who we should contact for your project for updates.

Well, well, well, it appears as though WordPress fanboys and fangirls are even more bent on making the popular platform a complete Content Management cure-all than we initially thought.

Though it’s no secret that additions and plugins are always being built for the blogging tool, this time we've been hit closer to home. WPML, a mega-plugin written by OnTheGoSystems, aims to boost WordPress from simple blogging platform into the realm of proper Web Content Management Systems. The method? Multilingual support.

 Anyone who’s anyone knows the Internet is practically vibrating with the buzz over cloud computing, how best to structure it and what it means for the future of the Web. Much like the recent microblogging trend and what it means in terms of ROI and customer service, companies are trading in their souls for a piece of the action.

One of the latest vendors to jump on the bandwagon is Six Apart (news, site). Their recent partnership with Etelos Inc. enables their Movable Type blogging platform to be available in a “cloud-hosted” environment.

Those who are struggling with tracking (and participating in) what their community is doing across many different social networks now have a new tool at their disposal.

This tool is Motion, which you install on top of Movable Type Pro and use to create a deeper relationship with and understanding of your community.

Movable Type users have had access to plug-ins for building contact forms for some time now. Until recently however, MT users had to create hacks in an entry/comment based system for the handling of requests and inquiries. There was nothing addressing a workflow for easy contact management. Until now.

Six Apart, in an effort to become even more involved in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) movement, has announced that its Movable Type blogging software will soon be available hosting providers that utilize the Parallels Application Packaging standard. With Movable Type on one of these web hosts, consumers will be able to purchase and launch Movable Type-powered blogs in a new, more fluid manner.

The APS format was written by Parallels and gives web hosting providers the ability to provision and install Movable Type on their hosting infrastructure. Since Movable Type is now APS-compliant, the web logging software can be loaded via the Parallels' Plesk control panel.

Many web hosts easily installed blogging software to web hosting customers today using WordPress, an open source competitor to Movable Type. Today’s news from Six Apart will give those who want to launch a blog yet another choice.

It is no surprise that Six Apart is trying to become more entrenched in the Software-as-a-Service model. This hosted service model is attractive for software vendors and consuming companies as well. For the software vendors, they can gain a recurring regular flow of income. On the flip side, consumers of hosted applications can set up software environments cheaply and quickly with limited IS support.

We all love our micro-blogging applications. We Tweet, we Tumble, we Pownce (or at least we did Pownce),  we feed our friends. Now thanks to Movable Type we are in Motion. They have released a beta for their new social application, Motion, for licensed users of Movable Type Pro.

Yes, Microsoft has SharePoint. And it's the most talked about and controversial content management system out there today. Everyone seems to have it. Many actually use it.

But having SharePoint isn't enough. The company has just announced an open source web content managment platform (or blogging engine depending on how you slice these things) called Oxite. This new bundle of .NET code may be designed to take on the likes of WordPress, but will it do more than create a small sputter?

It must be interesting working over at Six Apart these days. They reported a 16 employee layoff and a management pay cut a few weeks ago. But things can’t be all that bad. They just announced the purchase of the micro-blogging platform Pownce — keeping several key people and the technology.

Six Apart knows there’s nothing worse than an out of work journalist. That’s why the company who makes the major commercial blogging platforms TypePad and Movable Type is offering pro-level blog memberships for free to out-of-work media types.

Six Apart, the producer of blogging platform Movable Type, has announced layoffs of up to 8% of its full time staff. The company behind other popular products and services such as MT Pro, Vox and TypePad is a force in the blogging world. Movable Type is a very popular blogging platform, powering many Weblogs on the Internet.

In addition to laying off 16 employees, the entire management staff is taking a 15% pay cut.