• GeoType allows you to associate GoogleMap data with an entry. Each map extends the MT Asset framework, so it’s managed similar to uploaded images or documents, and associated to an entry in the exact same way.
• PostOffice enables blog posting via email. You may have been following along in MTOS earlier this week about this one, Brad Choate made a lot of handy fixes.
• CentralAuthenticationService allows you to configure MT to delegate user authentication to a CAS server in place of the built-in native authentication scheme.
• BuildTracer benchmarks statically-published templates and provides a visual display of how long it takes each tag to publish. It’s originally by Akira and available on his site, but we’ve been updating it in Github to match the latest builds of MT.

Other plugins released this past week:

Taku Amano released CustomFieldsSearch which, as you can guess, let’s you search against your custom fields data.

ExpandCategoryAreaCSS from Yujiro Araki makes the category list on entry editing expandable so it’s easier to use.

RandomFeed by Junnama Noda displays a random feed from a set you specify in your dashboard.

We’ve also got a couple of tutorials to tell you about. Mike shows us how to create print-friendly entries using the Readability service.

Also, Maarten Schenk explains how to list entries from multiple Movable Type blogs sorted by date. What Maarten is doing here goes beyond what the built-in multi-blog functionality can do.

What have you done with MT lately? Let us know in the comments.

We’ve also got a couple of new plugins this week. SKYARC System Co., Ltd,. created BasicAuthAutoCompleteLogin, which allows you to use your MT credentials on pages protected with basic HTTP auth.

Konjak from ELASTIC Consultants Inc does translation of your blog posts using either Google or Bing translation services.

For those of you running multiple blogs on MT, you can use QuickRebuild from Taku Amano to republish all your blogs at once.

One of the most powerful features of MT is the ability to publish your entries any way you want. Gercek Karakus needed an XML feed for Flash, so he created this template.

Finally, Maarten Schenk has a few tips and tutorials for us this week:

• Loading any Object (Entry, Page…) Based on a Custom Field Value — This will be useful if you’re writing MT plugins. Maarten shows how to use the search_by_meta method to do lookups based on custom fields.
• Looping over a List of Numbered Custom Fields in Movable Type — This post explains how to loop through your custom fields in a particular order.
• Optimizing Movable Type’s Standard Templates for Speed (part 2) — Maarten brings us more tips for optimizing our templates. This time, he talks about using caching to keep all parts of your site up-to-date while minimizing publishing time.

What have you done with MT lately? Let us know in the comments.

Also last week, Mike released a Google Buzz Action Stream plugin. If you haven’t used Google Buzz, it’s, well, a lot like Action Stream, really: It creates a feed of your activity on multiple social sites. Additionally, you can follow other people’s feeds and comment on items.

This week, Nick from MT-J posted some Twitter tools to tell you about. Motokazu Sekine has written a PostToTwitter plugin similar to HashTag. Also, SKYARC System Co., Ltd created GetTweet, which creates blog entries from your Twitter posts.

Nick also lets us know about the Period plugin from Taku. It lets you set a date when a post should be unpublished.

Besides plugins, we’ve also got a few Movable Type tips for you. Maarten Schenk published the following this week:

• Optimizing Movable Type’s Standard Templates for Speed (part 1) — This is a good explanation of why many of your index templates should not be set to publish automatically.
• Getting the Height/Width of a Thumbnail Generated in Movable Type — Maarten shows you how to access height and width data for your uploaded images.
• Trimming Any Content to a Number of Words in Movable Type — Not every MT tag supports trimming to a certain number of words. In this post you’ll learn how to solve that using regular expressions.
• Blog Specific Content in Signup, Login and Profile Screens — Maarten explains how to give each blog in your MT install a different login page.
• Deleting All Entries from a Movable Type Blog… In One Go! — This is dangerous knowledge, but useful.

Finally, Yujiro Araki explains how to display a list of entries grouped by tag.

What have you done with MT lately? Let us know in the comments.

• Corrected a problem with user privilege changes implemented in Movable Type 4.33 that prevented a user from uploading a userpic (a picture of himself or herself) in some situations.
• Fixed a typographical error in the lib/MT/Summary/Proxy.pm Perl module in Movable Type 4.33 that resulted in “subroutine redefined” errors being reported in some circumstances.
• Fixed a problem with the internal search facility within the Movable Type 4 CMS that prevented more than 125 results matching the search criteria to be displayed. Thanks to Mark Carey for the patch.
• Fixed a problem with the internal search facility within the Movable Type 4 CMS that caused all “Regex Match” searches to return no matches.
• Fixed a problem in Movable Type 4.33 where searching for entries by date ranges returned incorrect results. This problem was most noticeable to users of the Blog Stats Dashboard Widget. It often displayed no activity for entries or comments regardless of actual activity.

Lots of new and updated plugins to tell you about this week. First, Dan Wolfgang has updated his More Custom Fields plugin. This new version makes Selected Entries easier to choose, adds a new “Selected Pages” field type, and makes the plugin free for all users.

Mike at Code Monkey Ramblings has updated his Comment Flag plugin. This plugin now sends an email notification when a comment has been flagged.

Mike also has a new plugin. MT Closure Compiler makes use of Google’s Closure service to minify and optimize JavaScript index templates as they’re published.

While you’re there, be sure to also checkout Mike’s WordPress Extended RSS template and all his new themes.

Over at MTJ, Nick tells us about CMSContext, a plugin that allows you to modify the MT admin using MT template tags. It was developed by Junnama Noda.

Hajime Fujimoto is the developer of Numeric Custom Fields, which gives you the option of creating integer and float custom fields.

for out last plugin this week, ParentalInclude by SKYARC System Co., Ltd. makes it easier to include a template from a parent website inside a blog template in MT5.

Over at Movable Tips, Maarten Schenk has several new tips for us:

Template Syntax Highlighting in Movable Type Templating Entries — Maarten uses Google Chrome to add code with syntax highlighting to his blog posts.

Using Movable Type Template Tags to Count Things — Another fun templating lesson. This time, Maarten shows us how to count just about anything, using the like modifier.

Premature end of Script Headers, Error 500, Movable Type and You — This post explains the cause of some common script errors, and gives advice on tracking down the problem.

Displaying a Thumbnail of an Entry Image with the Title of a Post — Here, Maarten shows us how to loop through your entry assets and display a thumbnail image to represent each post.

What have you done with MT lately? Let us know in the comments.

First, let’s take a look at what’s going on over at Movable Tips:

• Entry numbers in Movable Type — Maarten wrote a small plugin that gives you a counter for all your blog post, which allows you to do things like, “Post #3 of 118.”
• Links to alternative archives: regex_replace to the rescue! — This post explains how to use the regex_replace modifier to produce links to your alternate archives, like for mobile.
• Can’t call method “…” on an undefined value… — Maarten dives into a common error message and explains both the programming logic behind it and how to track down the problem.
• Protecting (parts of) your Movable Type site with a password — This is what’s fun about MT: The ability to use it to generate anything. In this case, we learn how to generate the files needed to do Basic HTTP Authentication for sections of your site.
• How to deal with mt-search.cgi causing high load on your server? — How to reduce your server load by banning search engines from hitting your search results pages.
• Fighting Comment Spam on Movable Type: What To Do First — Most MT users are probably familiar with TypePad AntiSpam, but if you’re not this post will show you how to set it up. I’ve personally been impressed with the results.
• Making (some) Movable Type 4 Plugins Work on Movable Type 5 — One of the side effects of MT5’s new UI is it broke a lot of plugins written for MT4. Maarten has written a plugin that should fix a lot of them by providing the menus that they expect.

And at MT-J, Nick has found some interesting things in the Japanese development community:

• UploadDir – specify your assets upload directory — This plugin let’s you specify different default upload directories for each type of asset you upload.
• Including a template module from the parent website — For those still learning how to create themes in MT5, this is a little lesson in including template modules.
• “ViewSite” enables you to view your site from your “System Overview” screen — This plugin adds a link to your site from the System Overview admin screen.
• You can use “else” statement in your block tags — Another lesson in how to “program” with the MT templating language. This allows you to provide alternate content when a page does not have any entries.
• “CKEditor”, an wyswig editor plugin with awesome functions — A plugin that will replace the standard WYSIWYG editor with CKEditor.

What have you done with MT lately? Let us know in the comments.

Just yesterday I found out about a new MT blog that I expect to be linking to a lot here in the future. Nick at MTJ is bringing Japanese MT development to the English-speaking world. There’s a lot of great MT work being done in Japan, and with Nick’s help we’ll finally be able to showcase some of it here. For example, Nick has recently written about a few new plugins:

• Escape Code and Action Streams — Escape Code makes it easier to display sample code in your entries. And this release of Action Streams brings that plugin to MT5.
• Bypass Dashboard — Let’s you bypass the dashboard when you log in. Particularly useful for people that only have access to one blog.
• AssetArchives — Create a set of archives for your assets. Could be the easiest way yet to create a photo gallery.
• Crypt — Let’s you encrypted the published file.
• System Menu — Gives you a menu for accessing system-level admin pages in MT5. A handy shortcut for those of us that got used to that menu in MT4.

Also, be sure to check out Nick’s coverage of the MT Developers & Designers Conference held recently in Tokyo.

Speaking of plugins, Chad Everett has announced that MT-Notifier 5 is on the horizon. The big change is this version can store templates in the database, which allows for templates to be associated with a context and blog-level templates.

Last week we told you about Maarten Schenk’s wonderful new Movable Tips blog. Here’s a few more posts from his archives:

• Making a search go directly to an entry if there is only one result — This is a really good idea, and easy to do.
• Sorting items that don’t have a ’sort_by’ attribute — I had no idea that MT template variables could be arrays. Maarten shows how to use those arrays to sort anything.
• Using PHP inside Movable Type’s Search Template — This is a problem I’ve had to jump through hoops to solve. Maarten’s solution is a good one.

Finally, Victoria at violasong has some tips for “decruftifying” MT5. Lots of great tips for those about to take the plunge and upgrade.

What have you done with MT lately? Let us know in the comments.

• Corrected category code for sending all comment notifications.
• Corrected ordering of permissions for widget installation.
• Fixed template tag name in widget.

Licensed users can download that update now.

Over at Code Monkey Ramblings, Mike has written a tutorial on generating shortcodes in MT or Melody. Besides showing you how to create shortcodes — reusable text replacement tags — Mike’s tutorial is also a great entry-level lesson on writing MT plugins.

Finally, former Six Apart Europe employee Maarten Schenk has started a blog of Movable Type tips. He’s already got a bunch of great content posted. We’ll cover more of Maarten’s posts in the future, but today I just want to highlight a few:

* Using Movable Type tags inside other Movable Type tags – This is a common problem people have as their learning just what MT is capable of.
* Integrating Google maps into Movable Type, without using plugins – Slick use of Custom Fields to pass a location to Google’s Maps API.
* Why you shouldn’t edit Movable Type’s database directly – Maarten gives a brief explanation of why deleting things from the database is a Very Bad Thing.

What have you done with MT lately? Let us know in the comments.

If you recall, MT 4.33 came out just a couple of weeks ago. For those that haven’t yet upgraded to that version, Six Apart has some details about the changes. Here’s a quick summary:

• Security Fixes
• New Configuration Directive
• Oracle Database Fixes
• Asset Manager Fixes
• Template Linked to File Fixes

I don’t believe I’ve ever seen 6A go into this kind of detail about a point release before. I hope it continues with future versions.

You should know, though, that some users have had problems with 4.33 wiping out the data on their dashboard. A fix has been checked in and a 4.34 release should be coming soon.

Also this week, I’ve heard about a couple of new plugins that Endevver (and, more specifically, Byrne Reese) is working on. First is Send2PQ, a plugin that will republish your entire blog via the publish queue. It can also email you when it’s done.

The other plugin, PicApp, gives you access to the PicApp service, which allows you to add high-quality stock photography to your blog.

What have you done with MT lately? Let us know in the comments.

Other changes, from the official announcement:

• Added bypass setting for skipping old notifications to new subscribers.
• Added checking of record count to queue sent message.
• Added include/header.tmpl to plugin.
• Changed subscription sort date to modified (from created).
• Cleaned up carriage return/line feeds in plugin files.
• Cleaned up code by removing unused callbacks.
• Cleaned up history writing routines.
• Converted Notifier->instance to MT->component.
• Converted Notifier.pl to config.yaml.
• Corrected problem with queue limit not working.
• Corrected widget method names to be more consistent.
• Moved subscription verification to CommentScript (from AdminScript).
• Moved content from App.pm to Plugin.pm.
• Updated translation file strings.
• Updated object file definitions.

We’ve also got a couple of items from the Melody Project. First, Byrne Reese explains Pubsubhubbub and why it’s in Melody. Also, if you’re interested in unit testing and using Git with Melody, Jesse Gardner posted a screencast featuring Jay Allen and Byrne Reese.

What have you done with MT lately? Let us know in the comments.

• A new user dashboard for both the website and blogs. This makes it easy for authors, editors, designers and other publishers to easily navigate between the two.
• A new theme mechanism that makes it easy to apply a new theme across a website and blogs with a single click that proliferates changes throughout the published site.
• Enhanced content management features that include revision history and new custom fields. There are five new object types for custom fields: website, blog, comment, template and asset.

There are significant changes to the UI, which have caused some to claim that Six Apart borrowed the design from WordPress.

First, a nitpick: The similarities are on the entry edit screen, not the Dashboard. Second, the main section and the right sidebar of that page haven’t changed much from MT4, so those similarities are almost three years old. And MT3 had a left-side navigation, which was replaced by the top navigation in MT4. A lot of users found the MT4 navigation confusing, so it’s not surprising they changed it in MT5.

Now, having said all that — yeah, they look a lot alike. the two apps keep trading features back and forth, so it’s not surprising that their UIs would evolve to look similar as well. Still, If 6A wanted to avoid the comparison they should have done more to differentiate the MT UI.

Next, we have a couple of plugins from Byrne Reese. First, his LinkToTheme plugin lets you link a template to a theme, which means that template does not have to be refreshed when changes are made. This has potential to greatly speed up design changes.

Also, Byrne is working on a plugin to allow blogs to support the Twitter API. Other hosted blog platforms have done this recently — by providing an API that matches Twitter’s, these blogs can be accessed from some Twitter clients, like Tweetie and Twitterrific for iPhone.

For those of you looking to develop your own MT plugins, Mike at Code Monkey Ramblings has a tip for adding your own modes to MT::App objects. It’s done via the plugin’s config.yaml file, which I’m finding is a very powerful part of MT’s current plugin architecture.

Finally, the Melody project is doing another webinar this Wednesday, January 13. This time, they’ll be covering debugging and unit testing. Anyone interested in contributing to the Melody project should attend.

What have you done with MT lately? Let us know in the comments.