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Movable Type 6 Released

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With all the excitement at the Movable Type Idea Exchange, I totally forgot to post about this: Six Apart has released Movable Type 6 yesterday.  There don't seem to be any release notes with this announcement, but the two major new features are the Chart and the Data APIs.  The first one replaces the old flash-based dashboard widget and enables all kinds of visualisations about the sites and blogs in an MT installation, and the second one allows external applications to talk directly to MT so they can post/update/delete/extract/query... the content inside MT.

I'm in New York today for the Movable Type Idea Exchange.  All presentations are being recorded, but if you can't wait here is my low-quality livestream:

Holiday and a lot of catch-up work interfered, so I am a bit late with the news: Six Apart launched a beta version of the new Movable Type Theme & Plugin directory and a thoroughly renovated www.movabletype.com.  It looks gorgeous.

Yesterday Six Apart announced the beta of MT6. It sports several cool new features like a new web/JSON-based API and a graphing library + Google Analytics integration. However, the biggest bombshell was in the license change announcement (or rather, the clarification to the announcement), specifically these two lines:

  • Dropping MTOS offering - discussed in-depth on expanded post
  • MT Pro and MT Advanced - Will be under MT commercial license

In plain English this means that after ten years there won't be a free version of Movable Type you can download anymore (not as in beer and not as in speech).

It was announced last week while I was away on business so I couldn't write about it until now.  Movable Type 5.2.6 is out, and it comes with two big new features and some smaller ones: a new theme called 'Eiger' which is fully responsive (and a good base to build responsive sites on), and a revamped mobile version of the dashboard that lets you blog on smartphones on tablets.

Six Apart announced a new official product lifecycle roadmap for Movable Type on Christmas, and the most important news in it seems to be that support for version 4.x will officially end December 31st, 2013.  If you don't upgrade to MT 5.x by that time you are basically on your own... For most installations, upgrading from 4.x to 5.x shouldn't be a problem.  But not all plugins are compatible between 4.x and 5.x, so there certainly is some work to be done for plugin developers who want their code to keep working on the latest MT.  Should  you need any help with your upgrade, feel free to contact me!

Because I was at LeWeb in Paris for three days I missed the announcement, but Movable Type 5.2.2 is out (the first version using the new numbering scheme).  The most important new features are the new 'Rainier' theme and an option to quickly add 'boilerplate text' to entries.  The announcement & release notes are here.

In my spare time I've been working on http://www.trendolizer.com, a site that automatically finds and posts stories, videos, images etc. that are trending on Facebook.  I recently redesigned the site using the Bootstrap framework, and today seems to be an excellent time to point out that there is also a 'politics' section at http://politics.trendolizer.com where you can follow what is trending regarding the U.S. presidential election.  Read on if you want to know more about the technical details.

Ok, a bit later than I had hoped, but here is a quick report about my recent trip to New York for the Movable Type Idea Exchange...

First things first: if you want to watch the video I took of the speakers during the event, go here: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/movabletips-tv. I recorded and streamed the entire thing using an Android tablet propped up against a box, so the quality isn't 100% but you can clearly understand the speakers.  Also, the stream cut out every ten to fifteen minutes so the recordings are broken down into many smaller chunks. My own presentation (about localizing Movable Type) starts about a minute or two into this video: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/26244097.  You can also download a pdf of my slides.