July 2002 Archives

Ben and I will speaking at OSCON tomorrow (Thursday).

Our talk, Introduction to Movable Type, will cover the basics of installation and customization but will also address issues pertinent to developers: Plugin development, open APIs and the modular design of the system.

Additionally we'll be speaking about TrackBack, including details about its design and API. We plan on releasing more thorough documentation for implementing TrackBack in other systems, along with a standalone version of the core TrackBack functionality and the standalone threading tool described here. Both tools will be released under the Artistic License.

If you're at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, then you might be interested in checking out TrackBack at OSCON. The purpose of this page is to supplement ORA's existing weblog coverage and provide a listing of weblog entries regarding OSCON-related topics.

The support forum is now running on a new server. If you use the forums regularly, you will probably notice that it's faster.

We've tried to make the transition seamless, but in anything like this there are bound to be problems. And the main problem here is that when we transferred the threads from Ikonboard's Berkeley DB files to the MySQL database, all of the topics were given new IDs. This broke all of the old links both from outside the system and, more annoyingly, from within. The links don't necessarily seem broken, because most still lead to a thread--but it's very likely that it's the wrong thread.

Unfortunately, there's not much we can do about this. If you follow a link, and it doesn't seem to be the right thread, just chalk it up to this problem.

The other thing is that you will need to re-login on the new server (presumably), because your login cookie was set for the movabletype.org domain, and we are now (temporarily) using the mt.sixapart.com domain. After the rest of the movabletype.org site is transitioned to the new server, we will switch the forums back to running from movabletype.org.

Be sure to check out Dive Into Mark's series: 30 Days to a More Accessible Weblog.

Mark provides daily tips on how to make your weblog accessible to visitors with limited resources (both technologically and physically); additionally he provides instructions pertaining to a handful of weblogging tools — including Movable Type.

We've been integrating Mark's suggestions into the default templates and will release these changes in our next release.

I've put up a page listing MT resources provided by users of the system. This list is in no way comprehensive, but rather a work in progress — if you have a resource to suggest, then please contact us. Please note that I will also be setting up another page that contains tutorials that do not required any system code modifications or additional scripting.

Version 2.2 introduced another promising feature — plugins. (More info)

We're quite pleased to see that two Movable Type plugins have already been developed: MTWordCount and RSSFeed. Links to their development pages can be found on the external resources page. Keep an eye on this page for additional plugins as they are developed and released.