Return to open source >for leading blogging software

Movable Type 4

On the 5th of June 2007 Six Apart released Movable Type 4. Movable Type 4 is the long awaited beta update of the fabulous blogging tool from Six Apart.

Metis Internet Partners have been customising, developing and supporting Movable Type for the past three years. We are very excited about the new developments at Six Apart. New features include:

• A completely reinvented user interface with a dashboard overview of how all of your blogs are doing
• Support for publishing standalone pages and managing file assets and images right within MT
• Brand-new community features like OpenID and a built-in user registration system
• Redesigned component architecture that makes MT faster and more scalable than ever before
• Open source version with its home at a completely relaunched community site that revives an old, beloved URL: movabletype.org.

Six Apart has learnt a lot from its other blogging projects and platforms:

• Typepad
• Livejournal and
• Vox

And is bringing this knowledge plus overwhelming community demand into its development agenda.

As we have turned the blogging platform Movable Type into a user driven and managed content management system we are very excited about the new possibilities that this beta release offers.

Visit Us: http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/news/2007/06/movable-type-4-beta.html

Related Tags: movable type movable type beta six apart

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New beta release >for blogging platform

Movable Type 4 Beta 3

The Movable Type team has released a third beta for the Movable Type 4 blogging platform. Beta 3 allows the user to customise the dashboard amongst other things.

Beta 1 did not install on the pair server and I found Beta 2 difficult to use, particularly the user interface which was confusing compared to the elegant simplicity of 3.35, so it will be interesting to see how Beta 3 operates.

Parallel to the beta advancements has been the emphasis on increasing the community participation in the software development. Movabletype.org is now offering a comments feed so that beta testers can subscribe to comments about the beta platform.

The Movable Type team is doing its best to reclaim some lost ground. Things are looking positive in many respects but the answers will be in the quality of the application that they finally release. Until then getting as much user feedback as possible and integrating it into the application is the only way and Six Apart are doing a great job.

Related Tags: movable type movable type beta movable type community online community

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BETAS getting >closer to final product

Movable Type 4 Beta 4

The Movable Type team has released a fourth beta for the Movable Type 4 blogging platform. Beta 4 makes more refinements to the system level navigation scheme and to the primary navigation of the application, which will hopefully address one of our major concerns with the early bets for Movable Type 4.

The Movable Type team is now starting to focus on the delivery of the stable platform. They are beginning to respond less to feature development and more to bug fixes.

With the improved navigation and the release of the first Movable Type 4 plugin hopefully we will be shifting our blogs to Movable Type 4 soon.

Related Tags: movable type movable type beta movable type community online community

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Movable Type 4.01 Release Candidate 1

Movable Type 4.01 Release Candidate 1 was released in early September. The release contains a number of bug fixes including a fix for an XSS vulnerability and a fix for a bug that affects Movable Type's data abstract layer called Data::ObjectDriver.

SixApart expect that there will be one more release candidate for Movable Type 4.01. You can download Movable Type at http://www.movabletype.org/2007/09/movable_type_401_release_candi.html

Related Tags: movable type

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Installing Movable Type: The Simple Way

Staggernation recently provided a simple and quick guide to installing Movable Type.

Metis Internet Partners host Movable Type blogs on pair Networks. The following is a modified guide to installing Movable Type easily with pair.

1) Download the latest version of Movable Type. Choose the .tar.gz (for Unix, Linux, Mac OS X servers) option for the download.

2) Find the downloaded file eg MT-4.01-en.tar.gz.

3) Upload this file to the directory on your server where you want the MT directory to go—in other words, upload it not to your Movable Type directory (if it already exists) but one level up.

If you've ever uploaded Movable Type file-by-file, you'll quickly see how much faster it is to do it this way.

4) Open a shell (command-line) connection to your server using ssh. You may need to download Putty and navigate to the directory where you just uploaded the MT distribution file. See some common SSH commands for help on how to browse the server using Putty. cd /usr/home/ etc changes the directory.

5) Browse to the correct directory using Putty. When you have reached the directory that holds MT-4.01-en.tar.gz type the following:

tar -xzf MT-4.01-en.tar.gz

This will extract the files from the archive. It will take 10 to 15 seconds on a pair server.

6) Change the name of the folder through SSH, FTP or through the pair admin control panel and then login to Movable Type.

Related Tags: installation guide movable type movable type installation

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How to install Movable Type on Windows Vista

There are a few fragmented posts about Movable Type and windows installation, and an excellent article written by Chad Everitt in Learning Movable Type.

To install Movable Type on Windows Vista first you need to install PHP, MySQL and Perl.

The Movable Type installation guide references the tools that you need at http://www.movabletype.org/documentation/install/, Maximum PC Guides provide an installation introduction to doing this at:

http://www.maximumpcguides.com/how-to-create-a-windows-vista-iis7-mysql-php-web-server/

After you follow this guide you should be able to see a php page through localhost.

Then move on to Install Movable Type Under Windows (IIS). This will provide you with all the information needed to configure cgi scripts and the movable type environment.

Finally, modify the publishing settings to match the directory in IIS that you want the site to appear. Remember to open permissions on the directory so that Movable Type can write files and folders.

Related Tags: movable type movable type installation windows vista

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Movable Type Consulting Companies

For a comprehensive list of Movable Type Consulting Companies view the Movable Type wiki.

There are companies from North America, Europe, South East Asia and at this stage one from Australia, Metis Internet Partners.

The companies and service providers displayed created their own listings on this page and are not endorsed by Six Apart or Movable Type.

Visit Us: http://wiki.movabletype.org/Movable_Type_Consulting_Companies

Related Tags: movable type movable type consulting movable type consulting companies

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community >solution for movable type

Movable Type community solution

Recently I have been looking at the Movable Type community solution. It extends the Movable Type blogging package significantly by adding the opportunity for members of any website to blog, comment or post on a forum.

I have been very impressed with what I have seen so far. It looks like a fantastic opportunity for all sorts of online businesses to continue to expand their engagement with their users in a meaningful way.

Some of the features included in the off the shelf package are:

• Member Profiles: Registered members of your community can create and customize profiles
• Avatars or User Pictures: Members can upload an image of themselves to identify themselves on their comments, posts and profile
• Favoriting, Recommendations and User Voting: Your community can vote for its favorite content, making it easy for your readers and authors to see what’s most popular
• User-Contributed Content: Registered users can submit content to your site, and administrators have full control over what gets published
• Community Blogs: Exclusive new community blogs designed to allow any site visitor to become a contributor to your blog
• Forums: Powerful but simple full-featured forums completely integrated with your blogs, user profiles, and content management
• Comment Feeds: Automatic comments feeds for your site and for each topic, blog post and/or profile.

If you would like to know more about the product please contact us.

Visit Us: http://www.movabletype.com/products/community-solution.html

Related Tags: movable type movable type community movable type consulting

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New plugins >for Movable Type

Action Streams

Today, we're shipping the next step in our vision of openness -- the Action Streams plugin -- an amazing new plugin for Movable Type 4.1 that lets you aggregate, control, and share your actions around the web.

Action Streams shows a users actions on the web in most of the common social networks. Everything can be completely customised based on the users preferences.

Movable Type keeps getting better and better as it increases its reach in the open source and social networking communities. At Metis Internet Partners we have been looking at the Movable Type community solution, and this comment from Six Apart really sparked our interest:

There are even cooler possibilities with this new plugin when working with communities. If you power a community with Movable Type and want to aggregate activities of your authors, you can publish a summary of the whole community's activity. We've setup a demonstration of community activity aggregation running on MovableType.org right now. While the plugin today provides action streams for authors within Movable Type, you can imagine the possibilities in the future with all of your users in Movable Type Community Solution.

If you're not already using Movable Type, download it now and give it a try. It's worth it.

Visit Us: http://www.sixapart.com/blog/2008/01/time_for_action.html

Related Tags: movable type movable type community

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Connecting >communities

Blog It: Connecting Social Networks and MT

Blog It is a new facebook application that lets users post from facebook to Movable Type and any other blogging platform.

In conjunction with Action Streams this is a really exciting development from one of the most exciting online companies in the world right now.

Visit Us: http://www.movabletype.com/blog/2008/04/blog-it-connecting-social-netw.html

Related Tags: movable type movable type community movable type consulting social networking social networks

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New upgrade >for Movable Type users

Upgrading to Movable Type 4.21

Need help upgrading to Movable Type 4.21?

Here are some resources:

Upgraded to Movable Type 4.21
Movable Type Pro 4.21: Still Slow, Still Ugly
Adventures in Upgrading: MT 4.21 Gotchas

Most importantly look at:

Known MT 4.21 upgrade issues and
Gotchas With MT 4.2 Upgrade

Good luck!

Related Tags: movable type movable type installation

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Problems with userpic in Movable Type 4.21

There are a few posts out there with people documenting problems with userpics.

I have had a different issue. When upgrading to 4.21 I saved the assets and then copied them over with an ftp client. During the upgrade process these new files and folders were assigned the incorrect owner (should be nobody) which caused plenty of problems for users trying to update their userpics.

So make sure all files and folders in the mt-static/support are assigned to the Movable Type user - in my case nobody - and things will be fine.

Related Tags: movable type movable type 4.21 movable type installation

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