September 2005 Archives

Movable Type 3.2 has only been out a few weeks and we have already seen a number of innovative uses built on the platform. Here’s a look at two of them that launched this past week.

Wal-Mart is a company that elicits strong opinions - exactly the type of company that can greatly benefit from having a voice in the blogosphere. Wal-Mart’s Stories blog focuses on narratives from the frontline of Hurricane Katrina by providing behind the scenes stories of the impact of the hurricane on their business, employees and customers' lives. Many of these stories are quite compelling. and we were gratified to see that Wal-Mart is also reaching out to their readership to collect their Stories of Hope as well. If you are searching for someone, the blog links to Wal-Mart's "Post a Message" service which enables you to post a message or search for a message posted at any Wal-mart store in the effected area.

Another example of the human connection that blogs can provide is The Glaucoma Foundation’s new website. The foundation’s entire website is powered by Movable Type (just like ours here at Six Apart). This is a great example of how an organization with limited resources can take advantage of the flexibility of Movable Type. The Glaucoma Foundation is not a technology focused organization but simple, powerful tools have enabled them to maintain a site that accommodates all of their audiences needs (check out the site's high contrast and font size control features).

We can’t wait to see how other organizations are pushing the envelope and discovering new ways to use blogging to connect with the audiences they care about.

Since the launch of Movable Type 3.2, the team has moved nearly all of their efforts to processing help tickets and answering customers' questions as well as working on editing the the Movable Type User Manual. We're thrilled to have so much feedback, as the response indicates just what an overwhelming number of downloads we've had of the new version.

As many of you may know, the new manual is a complete rewrite of our documentation and because of that, we're still working to bring it up to the high standard that both you and we expect. We've been incorporating many users' suggestions left in the comments on each article but there is a lot more to do. In particular the upgrade documentation and the context-sensitive help pages (which can be reached from the question marks in the application) are the most needy and are being worked on presently. We appreciate your patience while we make these updates.

We also wanted to point out, for those of you who may have missed it, that the excellent, searchable Knowledge Base is available now to all users. Like the user manual, each entry has comments enabled and we will be either publishing those or incorporating the suggestions directly into the entries themselves. Some of the most requested knowledge base articles of late are:

• Upgrade Script Stalls
• Applying a New Style From the Style Library
• No System Administrator After Upgrading
• Installing the StyleCatcher Plugin
• Open Comment Author Links in New Window
• Creating the Site Javascript Template

This has been an immense job and we just wanted to make sure and thank you all for participating in making the Movable Type documentation better.