Tricks and Treats

Byrne Reese - 28 October 2007 - 5 Comments

Here are some highlights of the happenings in the Movable Type world for the week before Halloween.

• Read/WriteWeb upgraded to Movable Type 4 - congratulations Richard and team! A tip of the hat to the Media Temple team as well for their expert help in the upgrade and migration process. The (mt) people really know their stuff - they helped to isolate some significant performance enhancements that will have a lasting impact for all MT4 users starting with the next release of Movable Type.

• Todd of Geek News Central got frustrated with Movable Type's podcasting support. We listened. And thanks to his feedback, there is now a more complete solution for podcasters on Movable Type. His feedback will also result in other changes being made to the core to make Movable Type an even better media blogging platform. Thank you Todd.

• The Movable Type team is gearing up for a private beta of the Movable Type Community Solution, and the public debut of its functionality powering parts of MovableType.org.

• In some shameless self promotion, I recently added YouTube and Flickr support to Media Manager, extending the plugin for the first time beyond books and DVDs from Amazon. One of the design goals of Movable Type 4 was to make it as easy as possible for Movable Type to bootstrap just about any 3rd party or proprietary asset management system - Media Manager (licensed under the GPL) goes a long way to provide developers with an example of how to do just that.

• Chris Hall, Movable Type's lead QA engineer who has an almost freakish knowledge of just about everything, not to mention being one one of the best QA engineers I have ever met, wrote a plugin of his own: MTBooter makes generating large amounts of test data for a blog a snap. A very handy tool for developers and QA engineers alike.

• Mark Carey of mt-hacks released a new version of his wonderful Visitor Stats plugin. This plugin reminds me why I think Mark is one of the best Movable Type plugin developers out there by taking advantage of more and more of Movable Type's plugin APIs with each release. His latest release makes extensive use of dashboard widgets giving administrators greater insight into their blogs' visitors and where they are coming from, and even has a tiny graphical stats widget to display publicly on your blog.