Professional Network member Kevin Shay doesn't just keep busy by writing for McSweeney's or Modern Humorist, he's busy writing entire new plugin options for Movable Type.

Kevin's latest (and most impressive) addition to his stable of Movable Type plugins is BigPAPI. The amusing name belies some seriously powerful functionality: BigPAPI lets you transform any part of Movable Type's user interface programmatically, or if you want a soundbite: "server-side Greasemonkey for Movable Type".

With BigPAPI in place, you can manipulate the entire experience of working with Movable Type, creating your own plugins that layer on top of BigPAPI with custom functionality. As Kevin shows, entries linked to files, automatic publishing date updating, data from recent entries on your main menu, or even a menu that lets you jump to any function on any of your blogs... those are just some of the examples of what BigPAPI can do.

Of course, with this kind of power and potential, you'll need a good starting point to start hacking on your own. Fortunately, Kevin's written a great new Professional Network article: Developing Movable Type Interface Plugins With BigPAPI.

This new area of functionality can also be paired with Movable Type's customizable user interface templates for maximum flexibility. Together, these options promise the platform will be more capable than ever as we get ready for the release of the powerful new version 3.2.

Over the past two weeks, we've been telling the world a lot about Movable Type 3.2 and now it's time to show it.

Today, we are releasing the first beta version of Movable Type 3.2 and we encourage everyone to download it and see for themselves.

You can find the details over on the Beta Blog. We hope to see you over there!

If you are experiencing intermittent "500 Server Errors" while using Movable Type and are using MySQL for your database, we are aware of the cause of the problem: a nightly cPanel update of a buggy version of the DBI and DBD::MySQL drivers. See this post on the Professional Network Weblog for more details.

The MT engineering team has been actively working with developer to help him rectify the problem. We apologize for any inconvenience and will keep you up to date on our progress as well as post here when the problem is solved.

UPDATE (Jul 6th, 2005 11pm PST): The developer of the DBD::MySQL driver reports that he has discovered the source of the problem (with the help of our own Brad Choate) and posted a fix for the module. Those of your with hosts using automatic cPanel updates should see the updates within the next 24 hours.

UPDATE (Jul 7th, 2005 15:40 PST): The MT Engineering team has evaluated the new DBD::MySQL module and confirmed that the bug has been fixed. Affected Movable Type customers who have been upgraded to the latest version of the driver, either through cPanel or manual installation, have also reported normal operations have resumed. Thanks to Patrick Galbraith (DBD::MySQL developer) for his assistance and to you all for your patience.

This evening we released many enhancements to our TypeKey authentication service. For this release we addressed some lingering issues, and implemented several new features. Here are some of the highlights.

• For new users, we streamlined the registration and account activation process.
• When you login to TypeKey, you can now elect to have the system remember you for up to two weeks, streamlining the commenting process for users who comment on TypeKey-enabled blogs frequently.
• We introduced a new page that is displayed to TypeKey users if their email sharing preference conflicts with the requesting site's email address collection requirements.

A note to developers that have built applications that integrate with TypeKey: this release does not change the TypeKey protocol, and should not have any impact on your applications.

We're very excited about this release, and hope that it will simplify the TypeKey registration and authentication process.