April 2011 Archives

A long time ago in a galaxy far away, there used to be a Movable Type Community News Aggregator on the official Movable Type site.  It was basically a webpage aggregating the latest Movable Type related entries and articles from various blogs and websites.  But somewhere in 2008 it stopped updating.  I want to bring it back, but I need your help...

Official announcement here, downloads there.  Release notes can be found here.  Not long now for the official 5.1 release.

François Nonnenmacher from Ubiquitic recently released 'Memo', a small Movable Type plugin that allows you to add a text box to Movable Type's Create Entry screen.  Useful to let all the authors of a multi-author site know about new editorial guidelines, system maintenance etc. for example. But there is more you can do with it.

Hot on the heels of the Melody 1.0 announcement comes the news that the first release candidate of Movable Type 5.1 has hit the web.  There is documentation of the new features, along with an (older) slideshow that nicely summarizes them.  From the schedule wiki it appears the final release should happen one month from now and that the team will spend that time fixing any remaining bugs and creating documentation.  Nice!

The Open Melody Software Group has announced the official release of Melody 1.0.  Melody is a community-driven fork of the open source version of Movable Type 4.x, and can be used to completely replace it.  At the time of writing it is not up yet, but I expect there will be a demo version on-line here soon if you want to test it without installing: http://www.openmelodydemo.org/

Way back in the mists of time, Six Apart launched TypePad, something many described as an on-line version of their self-hosted software Movable Type meant for less technical users (or simply for those who didn't want to bother with technical stuff and just blog).  Compare it to Wordpress.com vs. Wordpress.org, if you will.  TypePad expanded rapidly and became a very large and succesfull premium blogging service, which it still is today.  Even though it evolved over the years, you can still see some Movable Type heritage in it here and there.

When creating a blog in Movable Type, you get the option of picking a timezone for it.  This is used in combination with the date/time on your server to put the date and time on your entries.  Basically this is done by taking the (UTC) server time and adding the timezone offset to it.