• 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.

Seriously, Six Apart? Is it April Fools’ Day today?

There is just too much resemblance to even bother putting both next to each other and point out all the similarities. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!
To say that I am flabbergasted would be an understatement. I can only hope that this is a linkbait and buzz strategy to create some momentum and Six Apart already has a new dashboard design for a soon to be announced MT 5.1. If not, I guess… ‘GPL FTW!’ ?

For those who are interested in the new features:

• 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.

The introduction of content revision history is also an interesting one. I understand that most popular features of all systems find their way into other systems, no matter if blog software platform, operating system or cars, this is a normal process but MT5 has just a little too many similarities at first sight. The possible argument to ease the learning curve for switchers coming from WordPress is a valid one but would also mean that Movable Type admits having lost the battle with WordPress.

For those who can not wait to play with MT5, read all about MT 5 here and download the open source release here. More news about the features of MT 5 on Monday by our in-house specialist Billy Mabray in his Movable Type Monday column.

This has been a slow week for MT news. Things should pick up over the next week, though, with today’s release of MT 5. As always, if you have some news to share, post it in the comments.

But I did run across one MT tutorial that I wanted to tell you about. Knut Haugen has figured out how to post to MT from Emacs. I know a few die-hard Emacs users that would absolutely love this. Knut is using the weblogger.el xml-rpc interface, which supports a variety of blog APIs. Note the problem Knut has with saving drafts. If memory serves, this problem is common when accessing MT via xml-rpc.

So as not to be accused of bias, I tracked down a vim plugin that posts via the Metaweblog API, which means it should work with MT. I haven’t tried either of these (I’m a Textmate guy, which can also post to MT.), so if any of you have please tell us about it in the comments.

What have you done with MT lately? Let us know about that in the comments as well.

AutoSmileys — Sebastian Böthin has written a plugin that replaces text-based emoticons with images. The plugin comes with a default list of emoticons to replace, but you can customize that list as much as you want. And AutoSmileys can be used just about anywhere — entries, comments, pages, and more.

Garmin Connect Action Stream — Garmin Connect is a social training log that lets you track and share your training activities using Garmin GPS devices. This plugin from Scott Hill adds those activities to your Action Stream.

LimitTitle — François Nonnenmacher has written two of this week’s plugins. This first one enforces a maximum length for titles on entries and pages. This is particularly useful for blog editors that need to maintain some consistency amongst their authors.

AssetDuJour — François’s other plugin, AssetDuJour, helps you organize your uploaded files. Instead of all files going into a single folder, it organizes files by a date-based folder system.

MT-Twitter — Finally, this plugin from Brandon Fuller imports your Twitter posts into your Movable Type blog. While not a new plugin, the recent update was the first one in over two years. With this new version, the plugin settings are styled with the modern MT user interface. Brandon also fixed a bug with converting URLs into links.

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

Mike from Code Monkey Ramblings has forked Byrne Reese’s jQuery Comment plugin. This doesn’t seem to be a radical departure from the original. Instead, Mike has concentrated on small tweaks that improve the plugin and extend its compatibility with existing themes.

On the admin side of MT, Beau Smith has written a tutorial on sorting the assets on the Entry Edit screen by title. In the post, Beau talks about sorting by “filename,” but from the code it’s clear what he meant was the user-editable label for the asset (which defaults to filename), rather than the actual name of the file on disk. Regardless, it’s a handy hack for making the Edit Entry screen a little easier to use.

Last week, I told you about a designer seminar being hosted by the Melody Project. If you didn’t get to watch, they’ve posted slides, audio, and some of the Q&A from the presentation.

Looking for an easier way to install MT? This week I’ve got two. First, if you use Sun’s OpenSolaris, you can now find MT in the “contrib” repository. And, MT is now available as a Turnkey Linux appliance that can be used in many different virtual environments, including Amazon EC2.

Finally, there’s been discussion this week about MT’s support for Safari. Six Apart‘s official stance is that MT should work in Safari, but their QA department doesn’t test in that browser — they only test in IE6+ and Firefox 3.5+. Since QA doesn’t test it, they don’t officially support it.

As far as testing suites go, this does seem insufficient. WebKit-based browsers are becoming more prevalent, so you’d think they’d at least test in Safari so they could have a good feel for how it works in Chrome, MobileSafari, etc. I can understand the decision — with limited resources, you test what paying (i.e. enterprise) customers are most likely to use. I just don’t think it’s the right decision.

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

Byrne Reese has announced a new version of the Media Manager plugin. The previous version was broken by a change to Amazon’s API. Rather than patch the problem, Byrne did a major rewrite of the software to take advantage of an existing Amazon API library. As a result, folks upgrading from a previous version will likely need to update their templates.

Also this past week, Beau Smith published a tutorial on hacking MT to list pages by created date. This hack allows you to modify the MT admin so that the list of pages is sorted by their creation date. Why would you want to do this? As Beau explains, the “authored on” date is easily edited in batch mode, making it an easy way to create a custom sorted list of your pages.

Finally, the Melody Project is hosting an online designer training seminar. The seminar is December 16 at 10:00am PST, and will last about 45 minutes. From the announcement, topics covered will include:

• Creating, packaging, and distributing themes.
• The templating language.
• Custom theme options.
• Preferences bundles.
• Differences between Melody and Movable Type.

You’ll also have the opportunity to provide feedback to the development team.

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

Also for MT5, 6A’s Beau Smith wrote up a new installation and upgrade guide. This set of instructions covers a lot of different scenarios, with additional reference material so you understand what is going on. This is probably the most extensive installation documentation for MT I’ve ever seen. Good work, Beau.

Finally, 6A hosted a conference call last week to answer people’s questions about MT5. It’s worth listening to the whole thing, but here are some of the highlights:

• On why Motion was left out of MT5: A matter of time and resources. MT5 makes a lot of changes to the UI that were incompatible with the templates and plugins that make up Motion. The Motion theme, along with Action Streams and microblogging, will return, but no timeline has been set. Also, they felt that TypePad Motion was an acceptable alternative in the interim.
• MT5 Enterprise will not be released until sometime next year, probably the second half of 2010.
• They reiterated that the new Website object is required in MT5. You cannot create a Blog that is not a part of a Website.
• Users with Blog-level access will not see Website options.
• When you upgrade, Blogs will be combined into Websites based on the Blog URLs. You’ll then need to rename the Website and customize it as you like.
• The new theme, Pico, is a blog-only theme. It is not a full Website theme. The Professional Template Set has been upgraded to a Website theme.
• Another plugin that was removed due to time constraints was Zemanta. They hope to bring it back soon.
• The ability to login via Yahoo OpenID was removed. Apparently, Yahoo made a change to their service which broke the functionality. Although the change was minor (the domain changed), it was after a code freeze, so it was left out. It will be restored in the next release.
• There was a question of whether it would be necessary to do a wipe and install of MT5, instead of an upgrade. They said an upgrade should be fine, though if you have Motion and/or Action Streams installed you might have some issues with those.
• Licensing should be simpler than before, though how much an upgrade will cost will depend on what current license you have.
• Also, since upgrading MT5 could be daunting for a lot of users, 6A is planning to list developers that are “certified” to help with upgrades.

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

While Japan enjoys MT5, everyone can try Asset Gallery 1.2 from Endevver. Asset Gallery lets you embed slideshows in entries, user profiles, or pages. And it includes lots of options for customizing the look of your slideshows. Better still, Endevver is releasing it as an open source project.

Finally, Dax from GuruLabs posted instructions for resetting MT passwords using SQL. Dax includes instructions for both MySQL and PostgreSQL. If you just need to reset one password, it’s probably easier to do it from the MT admin. But if you needed to update several users at once, this would be much faster.

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

• A lot of work to get the dynamic publishing in sync with the static publishing.
• Updates to the Professional blog templates
• Unbundling of Motion and Action Streams
• The Entry/Page “previous” and “next” container tags now account for entries/pages with the same date-time, rather than skipping them.

The item on that list that catches my eye is the “unbundling” of Motion and the Action Streams plugin. This is the first I’ve heard of this. If you download the release candidate you’ll see that, sure enough, the Motion template set and the Action Streams plugin are gone. One has to wonder if this is the end of Motion or if it will be back as a separate plugin. If anybody’s heard more about this, let us know in the comments.

Over at the Melody Project, they’re making progess toward an initial release. To give people a sneak peak, they released a list of planned 1.0 features. Some of the more interesting ones include revision histories, a full-screen editor, and a smaller core. It’s good to see this project gaining momentum.

We’ve got one new plugin to talk about this week. Byrne Reese has developed a plugin that “provides integration with Stumple Upon’s URL shortening service and iframe viewing window.” On top of that, it makes it easy for you to host your own shortened URLs.

One of the scariest jobs you’re likely to have to do with your MT site is move it to another server. There are lots of ways to do it, each with its own advantages. Larry Sampas documented his latest server move. He did it using rsync, which is a great way to move the files between servers without downloading to a local machine.

Finally, Beau Smith has a tutorial on adding edit links to entries and pages. This method checks the user’s cookies to see if they’re logged in before displaying the links.

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

• New Pico theme.
• Fixes for FastCGI bugs.
• Lots of improvements for backup and restore.
• A ton of bug fixes.

According to the schedule, there should be one more release candidate in mid-November, then a final release of 5.0 during the first week of December.

Besides the app itself, a lot of work is being done on the MT5 documentation. Beau Smith announced that the doc index and a page of recent updates is now available. Here’s hoping they have time to release a lot more documentation before MT5 ships.

The Melody Project has also made progress recently. In particular, Byrne Reese posted a major refectoring of the blog settings. Byrne moved all the settings to the same screen to improve performance and usability. I’m eager to see what other UI improvements the team makes.

Finally, the folks over at Endevver Consulting have written a tutorial on creating an event calendar with MT. The setup looks to be far better than the one I hacked together back in the MT3 days.

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

First, Mike T. from Code Monkey Ramblings has a new MT theme: Dark Marble. Based on a WordPress theme by the same name, Mike says he should have a version that supports the professional website templates soon.

Mike also has two new plugins. Comment Flag lets users report comments to you via email. The plugin uses jQuery so that the interaction is seamless for the user.

Mike’s other new plugin is Executable File Filter. It checks whether uploaded files are executable binaries or PHP scripts and renames them so they can’t be run.

Besides plugins, we also have a few tutorials to share. Beau Smith wrote a post on how to create an advanced breadcrumb navigation. Beau uses the function argument of the var tag to add and remove breadcrumb locations in an array. I have to admit, I was unfamiliar with this functionality. It’s features like this that bring MT close to being its own programming language.

For those of you that blog from your mobile phones, Jenifer Hanen explains how to change the directory where photos are uploaded. Apparently, the Atom Protocol service — which is often used by mobile client applications — in MT can only handle uploading to the main blog directory. Follow Jenifer’s instructions and you’ll be able to upload to any directory you like.

Finally, Jason Hunter has just released the code he uses to run MT under the Catalyst MVC framework. Jason explained how he did it several months ago, but just recently put the code on Github.

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

Last week I told you about the first release of SmartTrim, a plugin by François Nonnenmacher that is a replacement for the default text trimmer in MT. A few days later he released an update. This version changes the argument syntax to match that used in MT. It also auto-closes any HTML tags in your text.

François also wrote about moving from Drupal to MT. He includes a script that will generate a MT import file, along with tips on redirecting links. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone do this before, so it’s nice to have the process documented.

We also have a tip from “The Aardvark” on Adding TweetMeme to your MT blog. Not complicated at all, but good practice for anybody learning how to customize their templates.

Finally, Byrne Reese has been working on MT/Melody documentation for designers. Byrne has posted the documentation as a Github repository, so you can contribute to the project.

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

One thing that’s been getting a lot of attention is the upgrade of existing blogs to the new “website with blogs” structure. Some people are concerned that it will be too complicated for those that just want a blog. It’s a fair criticism, though I don’t see many people these days using MT as “just a blog.” Six Apart is paying attention, though, and has revised the process to try and strike a balance between features and simplicity. It will be interesting to see how they ultimately solve this issue.

Also this week, Byrne Reese announced that mod_perlite is available This is an Apache module designed to run Perl in much the same way that PHP runs on a web server. This would make MT and other Perl applications faster and less resource intensive. The developers now say they’ve got it running MT and hopefully someone will do some benchmarking soon so we can see the difference.

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

First off, there’s a new MT5 beta. Lots of improvements and bug fixes over the previous beta. But, if you haven’t installed it yet, you might just want to wait: I’ve heard that beta 3 is supposed to be released in the next day or two.

Next, Byrne Reese has a new plugin that implements OpenSSO. This allows you to use an OpenSSO server as a single sign-on solution for your MT installation. For more on OpenSSO, see the documentation from Sun.

Need help installing MT?, Sahas Katta has created a video to walk you through the process. His process includes a shell script that does most of the work for you. Thanks, Sahas!

Finally, Tom McGee wrote a post with several tips for customizing MT blogs. Tom’s tips focus on creating custom themes and modifying banner images in default themes. Good information for those less familiar with MT’s current theme system.

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

* Websites — MT 5 will have the concept of a website, which includes blogs and pages. This makes it more of a CMS, and makes it much simpler to use MT to maintain your entire site.

* Revision History — Entries, pages, and templates will all maintain a revision history. I’m particularly excited about this feature. The ability to modify templates, and return to previous version, is very useful.

* Custom Fields — Custom fields are now available on more objects and can be imported and exported. Plus, you can map them to a category/folder, so that they only appear if an entry/page is within that category/folder.

* Themes — MT 5 will have a whole new theme engine, which allows the bundling of templates, CSS, images, etc. together as a complete website theme.

…and lots more. MT5 will be a huge change from previous versions, pushing the platform more towards a CMS and further away from being a personal blog engine. We should get more details about these other changes in the coming months.

Also this week, Byrne Reese released a new beta of his Media Manager plugin. This release fixes problems caused by Amazon changing their API.

And finally, Bill Hartzer wrote a piece about search engine optimization for blogs. Bill covers some general guidelines, along with some specifics about MT. There’s some good information here, with links to other resources. Note: As noted in the comments, this is apparently an old article. My apologies for not reviewing it more closely.

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

The blog service will include management of the back end, SEO, and blog design as well as consulting. This could mean huge issues for other companies that have built up services supporting Six Apart’s user base.

Darren Rowse has all sorts of details pertaining to the deal and what kind of things we can expect.

San Francisco, CA – April 21, 2008 – Six Apart, the world’s leading blogging software and services company, today announced that it is adding a host of social media services to its existing technology offering in response to the growth of blogging into a mainstream communications technology. The company will provide new advertising, design, implementation, development and site optimization services to bloggers and companies of all sizes.

“Our customers have asked us for complete solutions as their blogging and social media efforts grow,” said Chris Alden, CEO of Six Apart. “We’re expanding our business so that our customers can benefit from our years of experience in this space. We can provide them not just with the technology but with the expertise and services to help them succeed.”

To support this growth, Six Apart has acquired leading social media creative agency, Apperceptive, LLC., and established an office in New York City. Apperceptive has worked with Six Apart for the past two years providing cutting edge development and design to leading web properties that include Huffington Post, Washington Post, Gothamist, Serious Eats, Boing Boing, Major League Baseball, and more. The New York team, currently hiring, will play a significant role in the delivery of social media services to customers and advertisers.

Advertising and VIP Services
Six Apart now offers a premium advertising program for influential bloggers and social media web sites as a powerful alternative to current advertising options. Thousands of bloggers on hosted platforms like TypePad and self-hosted tools like Movable Type and WordPress.org have the opportunity to make money from their blogs by participating in advertising solutions created by Six Apart that bring together the best of social media, blogging, and advertising. This new program builds on Six Apart’s years of experience providing innovative, custom media solutions to major brands such as HP, MSN and Universal Studios.

Six Apart’s new advertising services combine the depth of blogging with the breadth of social networks to create engaging, relevant online experiences that connect advertisers with influencers and their audiences. Six Apart is partnering with Adify, the premier technology and media company focused on vertical online advertising, to provide the advertising program to bloggers.

In addition, the Six Apart VIP program will promote and support influential bloggers in building their audiences and visibility. Services for VIPs include blog assessment and optimization, design and template analysis, and educational services and webinars.

Design, Development and Implementation Services
With the acquisition of Apperceptive, Six Apart will continue to design and develop next-generation social media applications and experiences for major bloggers, large media companies and corporate customers. Six Apart Services will help online publishers that want to power custom communities, encourage user-generated content, and manage web publishing from a single, scalable application. The group will also integrate social publishing platforms with customers’ existing systems to create effective internal collaboration tools.

Blog Optimization and Tune-up Services
Six Apart is offering a set of personal consultation services to bloggers of all sizes that help them get the most out of their blogs. The new “Turbo Tune Up” and “Power Launch” services, designed to improve the marketing impact of their blogs, are now available to all TypePad bloggers. These services are an addition to the existing world class support currently available to TypePad customers.

New Business Units
Six Apart is forming two new business units to provide the new services. Six Apart Media, led by David Tokheim, will provide the premium advertising program to influential bloggers and custom advertising solutions to marketers. This group will also identify, cultivate and support bloggers for the VIP program.

Six Apart Services, led by Marissa Levinson and David Jacobs, will provide design and implementation services to large publishers and corporate customers.

Any blogger can receive a blog tune up or power launch service from Six Apart’s professional support team.

“By adding these services as we continue to invest in our core technologies, Six Apart is ideally positioned to capitalize on the rapid growth in the blogging market and provide complete solutions to our customers,” said Alden.

About Six Apart
Six Apart Ltd. provides award-winning blogging software and services that change the way millions of individuals, organizations, and corporations connect and communicate around the world every day. The company provides the Movable Type social media platform, the TypePad hosted blogging service, Vox, a free blogging service for friends and families, advertising solutions for leading brands and influential bloggers, and services dedicated to making bloggers successful. Founded in 2002, Six Apart is a global company with its headquarters in San Francisco, CA, and offices in Tokyo, Paris and New York City . For more information visit the Six Apart corporate web site at http://www.sixapart.com/.

Here are some examples:

Since Six Apart powers the platform we have the ability to connect the bloggers and the advertiser in fresh, innovative ways no other network or digital media company can. We’ve been providing innovative campaigns to companies like HP, MSN and Universal Studios for the past two years and we’ve learned a lot about how to spark and sustain the conversations between marketers, bloggers, and their readers – in a way that puts the control in the hands of the consumers. Here are some custom examples

http://www.livejournal.com/entertainment/ – You’ll see the MSN Brand integration underneath the LJ Editorial

http://www.vox.com/politics/ – You’ll see the MSN Brand integration underneath the Vox Editorial

http://community.livejournal.com/knockedupmovie/ – LJ Sponsored Community that was developed for the theatrical release and then revived for the DVD release.

http://joydtaylor.vox.com/ – Vox Blog Themes that were developed for the HP campaign.

Another aspect of the campaign that was remarkable, was on http://www.designtoinspirecontest.com/ Over 330 users submitted designs that they created both to share with others and to enter the contest. The designs were placed in a gallery for users to vote on.