Recently in Movable Type Category

I hope you can excuse the mess — my blog’s temporary new purpose in life is to serve as a sandbox for my participation in the Movable Type 3.3 beta. Observations to follow at a later time once the beta’s feature set is a bit more fully built out.

Congratulations to the team at Six Apart upon the release of Movable Type 3.2. I've been running the beta for the past couple iterations, and I can say that the latest edition of MT brings with it some terrific improvements. A few of my favorites:

• Improved installation and upgrade
• Unlimited blogs for all users -- including users of the free version
• Administrative-level view of all activity
• Built-in comment spam filtering
• Powerful new search tool lets you find anything
• A much needed freshening up of MT's default templates

So, hurry up and go get 3.2!

Douglas Bowman of Stopdesign just recently announced the launch of a new photo gallery templates page where he has made available extensive documentation and source files for his Movable Type-enabled approach to powering online photo galleries. His setup supports features such as descriptions for each photo, grouping photos into collections by using MT's categories, visitor comments, and plenty more. Good stuff!

Douglas Bowman over at Stopdesign has provided a rather nifty look into how he used Movable Type to power a personal photo gallery which is customized to suit his preferences.

Additionally, Jon Hicks of hicksdesign put together some notes -- quite some time ago -- on his easy-to-implement approach for using MT to manage one's link lists.

Good material if you're interested in pushing the content management envelope with MT!

It is coming. It is almost here.

I just recently upgraded to Movable Type 3.16. While not a feature-rich release, 3.16 is well-endowed with a huge number of bug fixes. As noted by Mena Trott, Six Apart actually went out of its way to hire a third-party quality assurance team to come in and beat up their code. Almost apologetically, Mena noted that "With Movable Type 3.16, we believe that we're getting back to the quality of code that our users had grown to expect. Even though it's just a point release, I believe it's a turning point for Movable Type as a professional product."

At the same time, I dropped in the SmartyPants plugin for Movable Type distributed by John Gruber. SmartyPants is brilliant and beautiful because it simply and transparently converts basic ASCII punctuation into typographer-friendly "smart" punctuation HTML entities. No more hand-coding these entities on my own. Let clean ASCII reign. Let smart punctuation be published. Let me do cartwheels through the streets and spin on my head.

This makes me happy.