Code / The Appnel Group 

Refreshing

9 Things I miss about Movable Type

It’s a refreshing change of pace to find a post by a WordPress user that compares MT and is actually accurate — even complimentary.

On MT4 and Perl 5.10

This is an important bit of information that I meant to put out there for anyone “Googling” on the topic.

A thread on the MT community forums reported having trouble running MT 4.0 with Perl 5.10.

I replied that the particular error “may be related to [Perl] v5.10 disallowing a sloppy program practice or it may be some difference in the ActiveState implementation.”

Chris Ernest Hall, QA manager at Six Apart, wrote me to let me know (he wasn’t able to get the message out to mt-dev where the topic was later picked up) that that particular error was a known issue that was fixed in MT 4.1. He also noted that “there are numerous other problems with Perl 5.10.0 in terms of necessary database libraries not being available. So, right now, Perl 5.10.0 (the ActiveState version at least) is not compatible with MT.”

The bottom line is MT 4 and MT 4.1 should not be run on Perl 5.10.0 at this time.

This is not uncommon when a new a “dot zero” release of any software is released. The good news is that MT works perfectly well with the latest stable release of Perl 5.8. Users just need to be a bit patient before jumping to the latest greatest version of Perl with their MT systems.

Two New Plugins: Again & Cache Output

Today I’m releasing a couple of plugins that have been on my desktop waiting to get out.

The first is Again for MT. This plugin enables a generic means of performing a recursive loop on some template markup.

I’m working to migrate a MT 3.2 system that used a plugin called MTAgain by LummoxJR. The plugin hasn’t been updated in years so I’m essentially adopting this plugin and have “MT4-ized” for this release.

The second is Cache Output for MT. This plugin speeds the publishing of pages by caching repetitive blocks of content in memory.

Mark Carey’s release of CacheBlock last week reminded me I had this plugin sitting around my hard drive for years now. It’s more rudimentary than what Mark’s plugin can do, but its been an invaluable tool for digging systems with poorly optimized templates out of a hole quickly.

Both are being released under the Artistic License and are free of charge.

The first stable release of Movable Type Open Source (MTOS) is here

[This post was cross-posted over on the O’Reilly Network LAMP blog.]

Last night, the first stable version of Movable Type under a GPL license was released. You can download it from here.

Being a Perl coder and advocate of open source, the release of MTOS has great significance to me personally.

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MT Tab Sweep: January 2008 Edition

Using an Offline Editor to Post to Your Blog Chad writes-up a nice overview (albeit Windows-centric) of using an external editor like Ecto or BlogJet with MT. The state of blogs and external editors is still kind of rocky though. AtomPub was recently made an IETF standard and has yet to make it ways into deployments. MT 4.1 introduces AtomPub 1.0 support though. Previous interfaces based on XML-RPC are a horrendously flawed mess. Though they shouldn’t have to care, sometimes technical details to indirectly impact users.

A Better Movable Type QuickPost I’ve been aware of the QuickPost bookmarklet in MT for years, but it never quite did it for me like my GmailThis! and post to del.icio.us bookmarklet. (Perhaps this is why I don’t bog nearly as much I use those sevices.) This post discusses how you can create your own.

MT Security Update for MT 3.3x and MT 4 Announced Last week Six Apart released security updates for MT 4 and MT 3.3. Having review the potential exploit the update addresses I have to agree with Su when he says “The issue itself isn’t too likely and hasn’t been discovered in the wild, but it’s always a good idea to apply any security patches, of course.”

Movable Type 4.1 Almost Here In the past couple of weeks we’ve seen a pair of release candidates from Six Apart for the latest MT, version 4.1. An announcement has not been made to the MT blog, but RC2 is available for download and expected to be the last before the official release.

Universal Template Set Jim Ramsey with help from Byrne Reese, both Six Apart employees, released a plugin that provides a template set for publishing a traditional web site using Movable Type that they call the “Universal Template Set.” Byrne did a nice screencast of what this plugin can do for your MT system. This is quite nice thing and a good step in the right direction that speaks to the power and flexibility of MT. I think the name does it a bit of a disservice though. (The use of “turnkey” in the announcement may be overselling things like the initial Podcast support in MT4, but I’m going to let that slide for now.)

When I first took a look I was under a different impression to what it was based on the name. “Universal” implies “for all uses” so I was expecting to see a bare bones set of MT templates in which other template sets could be built. It’s not though so I think there will be some confusion and skewed expectations. “Classic Website Template Set” would be more appropriate and clearer. It’s just semantics, but in my experience is that it’s enough to confuse and perhaps even annoy users.

Criticisms aside, this really is a good and welcome thing. I like the overall look of the default templates more then what’s been shipping with MT.

What’s (still) sorely missing is any type of documentation for building your own sets and styles. Arguably that is not the purpose of this plugin, but as the first of its kind and being released by two members of Six Apart’s staff I’d expect to see an effort like this serve a text book example for future development. It’s not really and that makes it an opportunity missed — at least so far.

With the changes made going from the MT 3.x default templates to what shipped with MT4, everything in the MT Style Gallery is broken when applied to default templates in MT4. (I’ve been mildly surprised there hasn’t been more of an uproar — not like the MT community needs another.) My concern is that without documentation — and some assurance this isn’t going to happen any time soon — there will few, if any, third-party template sets for users to choose from.

Yahoo! OpenID! Yahoo!

Last week, Yahoo announced support of OpenID 2.0 adding its 248 million active users to the OpenID universe.

This is big not only in the potential numbers, but in the momentum it puts behind adoption of the standard. This will push others to adopt industry power-houses to adopt a similar policy.

It’s also noteworthy that they specified version 2.0. To date most sites that have implemented OpenID have been using 1.0. (This includes MT.) OpenID 2.0 has the potential to be far more useful since it adds the ability to exchange additional attributes such as a name or email address.

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On The Road Forward

It’s been over a month since my last post here and I need to break the silence. The run up to the holidays and then the clean-up coming out the other side got the better of my time and attention. And, as welcome as it was, the release of MTOS (the MT core under a GPL license) and the first beta of MT 4.1 complicated things.

Not that I don’t have a lot to say. I actually wanted to say something smart and interesting about the announcement when it happened a month ago, but it never happened. If you missed the news you can read about it here:

• Boing Boing: Movable Type now under a free license
• CMSWire: Movable Type Goes Open Source; Released Today

MT has been free for personal use and open (readable by anyone) source for some time, but releasing the core under the GPL opens a whole new dimension of where MT can go. The GPL doesn’t just mean free, but freedom for anyone to do a lot more with the system. The value of that freedom will take some time to ferment for end users into something palpable, but eventually it will happen and the community will be better for it.

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