Movable Type News & Articles

Metalogix (news, site) is at it again, offering another way to migrate your content into another CMS. This time it's for those of you who have a blog but are being lulled by the sweet song of SharePoint 2010.

Ladies and gentleman, Anil Dash has officially left the building.

As the very first employee at blogging and social media software maker, Six Apart (news, site) and a seasoned blogger himself (10 years!), Dash has been intrinsic to the company as well as the online writing discussion since the beginning. Consequently, his departure throws up a little red flag for some of us -- what does this mean for blogging? Or for Six Apart? Well we asked him, and this is what he had to say:

We’re about a week into the New Year, but don’t cork up those bottles just yet. At long last, Six Apart (news, site) has released Movable Type 5. The new version is being called “a great milestone in the 8 years of Movable Type history” by its team, and MT users are more than happy to welcome some long-awaited features -- features which we say take this project one step closer being a full-fledged Web CMS.  
 

Normally in this space we look back over the current month and forward into the next month at what the various open source CMS projects are up to. But rather than blindly putting out an update for January, we thought we'd look farther ahead into what everyone wants to accomplish throughout next year. Call it our open source 2010 predictions with less guesswork and high hopes.

‘Tis the season for milk and cookies, winter coats, and Web CMS release candidates. We writers won’t be back until after the start of 2010 when both WordPress and Movable Type are scheduled to have their official new versions out, so we thought we’d do a quick review of their most recent updates.

Welcome to the December 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.
 

Whether you are a blogger writing for food or more established at the art of drawing ire from the Associated Press or the FTC, chances are you’re dedicated to whatever it is you blog about. As the world slowly succumbs to wireless fidelity, subway systems and municipalities at the same time, blogging is no longer limited to those on laptops at the local coffee shop or at their home office. No, blogging via mobile device is now more accessible and viable than ever.

CMSWire steps beyond the traditional boundaries of non-traditional media platforms and offers a few tools for mobile blogging. From iPhones to Blackberry to Androids and Storms, these mobile platforms can help you chronicle your adventures while on the go or from where ever you please.

Welcome to the November 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 for your project updates.

Our friends at Six Apart are right on time with the new Movable Type (news, site) release. The fourth and last beta before the first of two scheduled version 5 candidates was kicked out earlier this week, and follows what MT developer Beau Smith called a "very fresh and new" beta 3. 

Here are the major changes in the newest version:

• “Professional Website Theme” is added as a new theme
• WebsiteLabel has changed to WebsiteName 
• Remove the definition of active users from app 
• Keep a compatibility of plugins 
• Create “MultiBlog Trigger” for “All blogs in this website” 
• MultiBlog Trigger also for “Pages” not only for “Entries”
• UI: “Created, Published, Edited” date and time of the entry
• DOC: FastCGI: Unable to access with XML-RPC 

Also noteworthy: Smith reports that because both default and global template sets have been updated, all must be refreshed to get updates.

The official Movable Type 5 launch is still slated for late November, so help the team filter out all the pesky worms before then by reporting any bugs you find here. 

Team Movable Type (news, site) says it's beta time again. Released just yesterday, Movable Type 5 beta 3 focuses on bettering various user interface elements, and will reportedly be the second to last fix we receive before two scheduled release candidates. 

"At this point we’re targeting for a late November launch of MT5," writes Beau Smith of Six Apart on Movable Type's developer blog.  "A more specific date will be available as MT5 code stabilizes."

According to Smith, the major improvements in beta 3 include: 

• Allow sub-domain blogs under one single website
• [Create New] shortcut button on Website/Blog dashboard.
• Cleaner and simpler User Dashboard
• Improved menu and button placement on [Edit Entry/Page] screens
• Download a zipped theme file when user [Exports Theme]

Though Smith claims that this particular beta "feels very fresh and new" there's always room for improvement. Be a good developer or MT user by checking out the full list of enhancements and fixes here, download, and do your part in making sure beta 4 is a step up by reporting any bugs you find during testing. 

As many of us wait patiently for the third beta of Movable Type (news, site) version 5, the team behind the popular Web CMS continues to tide us over with other updates.

Most recently they announced their partnership with Zemanta, a service that boosts content (blog posts, articles or web pages) by scouring the Web for related images, smart links, keywords and text,. The idea is that serving up these results to the user will enable them to enrich and inform their content in the most relevant ways. And by 'relevant; we mean Zemanta has indexed over one million popular media sources such as Wikimedia Commons and Flickr. 

"Using Zemanta is sort of like having a content servant at your elbow suggesting ways to make what you're writing more interesting and compelling through photos, videos, related articles, and useful tags," wrote Ginger Tully, Director of Marketing, Six Apart. 

Zemanta now comes built-in to Movable Type version 4.32, so if you haven't updated yet, now is a really good time to do so. Check out Zemanta's article about exactly how they're working with Movable Type here, then grab the newest version of the CMS and go content crazy. 

Team Movable Type (news, site) is "really stoked" about their latest announcement: a 2 month period of beta releases and official quality assurance testing for Movable Type 5.0, starting yesterday.

Beau Smith of Six Apart admits there are still some kinks in the code, but the development team was anxious to get it out and let the testing games begin. The plan is to release a new beta version every two weeks until it's stable (they're aiming for an official release some time in November) so feedback, as usual, is golden. 

Welcome to the September 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.

Six Apart (news, site) has kept their word and released a patch for the aforementioned bug in Movable Type 4.3. The new release, version 4.31, fixes some funk associated with custom fields and entry assets. More specifically, there was the possibility of a user viewing a template that might show code not designed to be viewed by the end user and couldn't be executed. New barriers include:

• Only allow the template_id parameter when the archive_type parameter exists.
• Force the template being used to match the archive type (e.g. if you're trying to paginate category archives, the template you're using has to be one that is producing category archives).
• Not allow the use of the template_id parameter when the extension is php or asp.
• Created a config directive (SearchAlwaysAllowTemplateID) that would always allow the use of template_id.  

Some other bits around the comment pagination javascript were fixed as well, and details can be found in the release notes here. Or you can just go straight for the download.

As the Movable Type team says, this release was almost entirely based on user requests and bug reports, so keep the ball rolling after you've upgraded to 4.31 by dropping your two cents here. 

If you happened to notice something buggy going on with Movable Type 4.3, we can explain: there's a bug in it. The custom fields and new asset manager related pest has been acknowledged by the Movable Type (news, site) team, but as of now there's no available solution. Word is that version 4.31, currently being tested, will be up for grabs at some point this week.

In better news, it's a good day for yes-frills fans. There's a new Movable Type plugin called Image Cropper available, which allows users to--you guessed it--crop images. Additionally, an updated version of the More Custom Fields plugin has been released and features a “Selected Entries” field. You can link as many entries as you like to the field and the order you add entries in is also maintained.

As always, you can keep up with Movable Type tidbits here, but if you want to be the first to upgrade to version 4.31, you'll have to incessantly refresh this page.