August 2007 Archives

Boing Boing is one of the biggest breakout successes in the history of blogging. From its roots as a zine cofounded by Mark Frauenfelder and Carla Sinclair to its presence today as one of the most popular blogs ever, the site has exceeded all expectations. Guided by Mark, along with David Pescovitz, Cory Doctorow, and Xeni Jardin, Boing Boing has influenced not just the blogosphere, but culture as a whole, leading the conversation on topics ranging from intellectual property to oddball gadgets to the fringes of art on the web.

And today, we’ve made them our Movable Type Featured Blog to celebrate the fact that they’ve relaunched on Movable Type 4.0. They’re using some of the most powerful features of the platform:

• MT4’s built-in user registration features let Boing Boing create its own database of registered users. Andif they want to support OpenID in the future as as sign-in option, MT4 has OpenID authentication built in.
• MT4’s ability to manage an unlimited number of blogs in one installation made it easy to launch Boing Boing Gadgets, which can share logins and management functions with Boing Boing itself. BB Gadgets is helmed by Joel Johnson, who’s no stranger to the big leagues of gadget blogs — he used MT every day as former editor of Gizmodo.
• MT4’s powerful comment management capabilities give new Boing Boing team member Teresa Nielsen Hayden the ability to oversee the site’s rambunctious and vibrant community. (You know Teresa from her venerable MT-powered blog Making Light.) And with MT’s multi-blog support, Teresa can manage comment on both Boing Boing blogs in one place.
• MT4’s flexible new templating features let our friends at Federated Media and Apperceptive take advantage of some unique features to help build the site’s new look. Cross-blog aggregation makes it easy to include content from more than one blog, and improvements to the templating language simplified the ability to choose exactly which content appears on each page.

There are, of course, many more people involved in a launch of this scale — Federated Media’s team played a pivotal role in everything from implementation to the business side of the launch, and you can read a bit about that on FM’s MT-powered blog. Jemma Hostetler created an amazing design that honors Boing Boing’s history while giving it a fresh, new look. And we’ve talked to Six Apart Professional Network members Apperceptive in a little more depth in an interview on our Professional Network site which talks a bit about the opportunities they’ve found in working with MT4 on sites like Boing Boing.

All of us on the Movable Type team at Six Apart are extremely proud to have played a small role in helping reinvent Boing Boing, and we’re thrilled that it does such a great job of showing what smart, talented bloggers can do with the power of Movable Type 4.

It seems obvious: Your blog's content is easier to read when it's presented the way it is on your blog. But somehow we've all been struggling to read through entries and comments in blogging tools that make a list of recent activity on your site look like an email inbox. So with Movable Type 4, we've redesigned the dashboard display of your entries and comments on the system's main screen, making it easier to skim and digest.

It might seem like a little thing -- who'd even notice if the Dashboard just used a regular listing of your blog's comments? Well, we think these little details matter: The benefits of showing blog information in its native format are both subtle and profound. It's only logical that you'd want to read the complete text of a comment before replying to it or when choosing whether to publish it on your site. After all, isn't getting the whole picture exactly what blogging's about?

But even more importantly, there's the psychological or even emotional context to maintaining a community; When you get used to seeing the names of your commenters, or the names of the other authors on your blog, and they're in the context of their own words and thoughts, it makes it a lot easier to connect with them as real people, instead of as just names on a screen. After a while, you start to recognize the names and writing styles of the most active members of your blog's community.

In creating Movable Type 4, we've worked hard to remember that we're making social software. That means we have to make sure the choices we make in creating the user interface and data presentation encourage constructive interactions between a site's publisher and its community. And that starts right from the first time you see entries and comments when you log in to MT4.

Your blog is a lot more than just the text you type in to your entries. It's the photos that illustrate your ideas, the audio files that make your podcast sing, and the video clips that capture your audience's attention. It might even be the Word documents or presentations or PDFs that help you make your case.

But keeping track of those files, let alone easily using and reusing them in your blog can be a real pain. Having to struggle with FTP to upload files, or trying in vain to remember where a file is stored on your server can take your mind away from the ideas you were trying to blog about in the first place.

So in Movable Type 4.0, we've included a powerful file management system that has all the capabilities of an asset manager from a complicated content management system, but still keeps the simplicity and ease-of-use of a blogging tool. Any file you upload is automatically stored in the system, where you can preview it, assign tags to help describe it, and easily search through files you've uploaded previously. And the asset listing screens let you filter to show just your images, audio, or video uploads with a single click.

And it's dead simple to insert the files you've already uploaded into your blog entries or pages. You can even use MT4's powerful templating tools to create custom displays of your file assets, like a podcast feed of all your audio uploads. There's a built-in sidebar widget for showing all your recent photos on the sidebar of your blog. And even more convenient touches, like the ability to preview your media files right within MT4 while you're editing, and detailed metadata on your file assets such as image dimensions, captions, and automatically-detected media types. Best of all, if you've got a number of authors contributing content on your blog, you can reuse the files they've uploaded as well.

The standard way of presenting information in blogging tools today was virtually defined by Movable Type's innovative user interface touches half a decade ago, with lists of blogs and entries and comments taking a position of prominence. Those lists were backed by a few utility screens for managing things like authors and permissions. But, having led the revolution in blogging since then, we've learned from our community exactly what information helps bloggers make their sites successful. Whether you're aiming for community interaction or simply to get the highest possible number of readers, we thought there was a better way to present insights into how your blogs are succeeding.

It's become clear: Serious bloggers don't just need raw data on the entries they've written -- you need understanding into what your audience wants.

As a result, Movable Type 4's most immediate improvement is the pervasive use of smart data displays, starting with the powerful new Dashboard. the Dashboard is topped with an intelligent dynamic chart showing recent commenting and posting activity for one blog or across the unlimited number of blogs that can be published with a single Movable Type instance. A simple click reveals a tag cloud display for one or more blogs, and you can easily explore your own blog entries by tag, for review or as inspiration for new entries. You can even use a range of new plugins to include data like the number of visitors or feed subscribers for your blog, by connecting to popular third-party services like Google Analytics or FeedBurner.

The graph of blog activity isn't merely an attractive way to look at your blog's success; It's also a powerful visual way of understanding what inspires your community of authors and commenters. See a spike in commenting activity recently? Just click and drag to select a range of dates, and the system automatically provides statistics about that subset of information. Point to any individual data point for more details on that day's activity, and then with one click, reveal a list of just the comments during that period of time.

There's far more than can be done with Movable Type 4's new graphical blog reports, especially with the new generation of plugins and system extensions designed to work with MT4. But we think you'll find the immediacy and interactivity of the new user interface compelling right from the first time you log in.

We owe a very special thanks to the MeasureMap team, friends of ours who spun off from the esteemed Adaptive Path team and helped design the excellent new version of Google Analytics. Their date slider widget, released under a Creative Commons license, shows the fantastic potential for collaboration between teams working on open platforms.

Now that Movable Type 4.0 is widely available and we've seen such a positive response, it's time to start diving into all the new features in MT4. Though MT has been fundamentally rebuilt from the ground up, the most obvious new improvement is MT4's striking new user interface

We've been fortunate -- Movable Type has always been praised for its clean, easy-to-understand interface. And now in Movable Type 4, the entire application has been redesigned, honoring its tradition of clarity but showing off a modern new look that makes it easier to understand your blogs, your community, and Movable Type itself. The goal? Removing everything you don't need, and making more opportunities to put powerful tools right where they're most convenient.

At a high level, the number of links and controls displayed on each page has been greatly reduced, and navigation has been refocused on a few simple links arranged around key tasks: Creating content for your blogs, managing the community and organization of your blogs, changing the design and styling of the templates that publish your blogs, and adjusting your preferences for publishing and managing your site.

The new design is even more striking for users who have system administration privileges -- there's a unique graphic in the system screens that helps remind you of context, but also hints at the new power under the hood.

From a more aesthetic standpoint, Movable Type also reflects its evolution into a true power tool. Instead of merely focusing on presenting lists of items in an administrative view, the system has evolved to focus more on presenting information that encourages creating new content and helping to build community. And even the distinctive new palette of Movable Type shows off how completely the system has been rethought, with a glossy black header, an entirely new set of default icons, and thoughtful elegant touches throughout the application creating a tool that's as powerful as the ideas that are published by our community.

MT4's new abilities are much more than skin-deep, of course, but we thought there's no better place to start describing the new platform than with the first part that will catch your eye. And we owe a special shout-out to our friends at Mule Design, not just for being long-time users of MT and members of the community, but for helping make sure MT4 looks like Serious Business.

When we launched the first beta of Movable Type 4 more than two months ago, we explained that we’re on a mission. The ideas were simple, but we’ve collected some of the early responses to MT4 which demonstrate how good tools, combined with a mission that we all share, have already helped inspire some great excitement about what’s possible.

From that earlier post:

[The] original audience of MT users has helped blogging become an incontrovertible success, in every realm from individual people talking to friends and family, to communities forming around every conceivable interest, to independent businesses being able to promote their efforts to the world. We measure success by how many new people we help to start blogging, and when we first launched Movable Type, there were almost no newspapers, television stations, radio broadcasters or publishers blogging. Today, nearly all of them are doing so, with many of them powered by Movable Type. And those of you in that core audience of MT users, the individuals who’ve become “blog stars” and helped inspire a lot of these other successes along the way? We think you’ll all find a lot to love about MT4 and the revitalized community as well. Those of you who are newer to the community: Welcome. We think you’ll find there are some amazingly creative and innovative peers for you here.

Put simply, we’re a company founded by bloggers, dedicated to the idea that putting more powerful communications tools into the hands of as many people as possible can have a positive, transformative effect on the world. Good communications brings people closer together.

What’s been exciting to see is that so many of you have responded to the mission we have for Movable Type 4.0 and for Six Apart as a whole. Here’s some early takes:

From CMS Wire (which is powered by Movable Type):

MT4 isn’t just unique in terms of its origins and functionality; it also represents a renewed and significant commitment by Six Apart to stand behind and invest in the product, and their core manifesto of blogging for all. A recurring theme with this release has been Six Apart’s ability to match enterprise demands with the free-wheeling desires of the less commercial bloggers.

Matt Grove weighed in:

MT4. Painless. Easy. Quick. Done. … The Movable Type 4 upgrade last night took quite literally about 3 minutes to complete… I love the fact I no longer have to write every entry with my own HTML, have a nice ajax-y interface to upload files, the site still looks great and doesn’t seem to have been affected by the upgrade whatsoever - exactly what a techie like me expects from good quality open source code ! All the new functionality is really, really good. Makes life easier to blog, so perhaps I’ll do it more ;-)

Sara at Serialpurrs gets to the heart of it:

Thank you all at Six Apart for making blogging fun again.

And the response during the beta of MT4 was just as strong. One of the most fun comments was from longtime community member Dan Sanderson: “Movable Type 4 is officially awesome.”

We’ve been bowled over by the amazing response, and the community site shows how plugin developers and designers have been just as inspired by the new energy that’s accompanied the release. Thanks to everyone who’s chimed in over the past few days, and we can’t wait to see what you do next with MT4.

Welcome to the all-new movabletype.com, redesigned to proudly present our all-new platform: Movable Type 4.0.

This is the biggest release of MT ever, a complete redesign of both the front end information architecture and the back end scaling infrastructure. The dozens of new features have been inspired by the outpouring of community support have helped inform our efforts: MT4 reflects what all of us have learned about how blogs work and where blogs are going.

Movable Type 4 has an incredibly broad set of new capabilities, but here’s an overview to whet your appetite:

• A completely redesigned user interface. The first time you log in to MT4, you’ll be greeted with a graphical display of blog activity, a customizable dashboard, and even more powerful ways to manage an unlimited number of blogs all in one place.
• Vastly more powerful publishing abilities. There’s new support for standalone pages in addition to your blog entries, much more robust templating including warning messages if your templates contain errors, and smarter archiving with the ability to create archives per-author or category archives paged by month.
• Better plugins, with many built in. Many of the most popular plugins from our community have been folded into the MT4 core, and dozens more plugins are either upgraded for or brand-new to MT4. The things you want to do with your site, from tagging to podcasting to managing your media and files doesn’t require you to install or configure any complicated plugins.
• Even more MT-only innovations. Cutting-edge identity technologies like OpenID are built right in, and nicely complement MT’s built-in user registration. And MT’s powerful permissions system is complemented by a robust set of fully-customizable permissions, so you can choose exactly what each member is allowed to do.
• Unique features. MT4 keeps the tradition of doing things that you can only find in Movable Type: powerful support for an unlimited number of blogs, with the ability to aggregate content from one, some, or all of your blogs in a single page. And the ability to add on solutions to your core MT install to enable Enterprise integration or advanced Community features.
• The best documentation in the business. MT4’s documentation has been rewritten from the ground up to focus on the tasks you have at hand. And the Six Apart Guide to Business Blogging is over 75 printed pages of information on how to help your company make the most of blogging.
• Dozens more features. We’ve got an exhaustive list of just some of the exciting new improvements in MT4. From better typography to the upcoming Open Source release of MT, there’s something for everyone.
• A reinvigorated community. Hundreds of thousands of you have joined us on the journey through the beta versions of Movable Type, by submitting bugs, downloading test versions of the software, reading up on the new features and documentation or by trying out demos. And the community has helped create the fundamental resources for this new version: movabletype.org, the home for the MT community, the new Movable Type Plugins Directory, and all of the exciting new plugins made specifically for this new version.

So, we invite you to give Movable Type 4.0 a try. Take a look around this site if you’re new to MT4, and take a look at movabletype.org if you’re new to our community. We hope you’ll take a minute to read up on why we made Movable Type 4.0. And above all, let us know what you think, and be sure to show us how you’re using Movable Type to share your great ideas with the world.

With the availability of the third Release Candidate for Movable Type 4.0, it’s time to get prepared for the launch of the new version of the platform. To help in the preparation, we’re putting out a call to all of our partners who are developers, designers, consultants, strategists and systems integrators. Join us for a series of online events this week that are designed to help you make the most of the launch.

MT4 marks the beginning of a number of new opportunities to get customers and projects by taking advantage of skills you already have, especially with the new capabilities of the new version.

Most importantly, we want to help you benefit from MT4’s launch. And to make sure you succeed, we’re going to provide the resources you need to help your clients, customers, partners, or coworkers get running on MT4.

This week, we’ll have training and education for consultants about what’s new and unique in MT4, as well as sessions with our dev team that will help walk you through moving your plugins, templates, and sites to MT4. Here’s the schedule:

• Consulting and Strategy Training for MT4: Want to familiarize yourself with the new features in MT4, and learn about the best way to sell both MT and your own services? Connect with members of our sales and marketing teams, who’ll give you info on everything from great example sites that show off the platform to competitive information and tips on convincing clients to adopt blogs. Wednesday August 8, 12p PDT/3p EDT

• Upgrade-A-Thon: Expert users, system administrators, consultants, designers and our MT engineering team will all upgrade test installs, cloned copies of live sites or non-critical production sites to help find any bugs in the migration process. Thinking of making the jump to MT4, and want the most experienced experts in the world by your side when you do it? Then join us for the first MT4 Upgrade-A-Thon. Wednesday August 8, 10a PDT/1p EDT

• Plugin Hackathon: If you’re a plugin developer making the move to MT4, and you’ve got some last bugs to squash or some new features you want to take advantage of, Get on board with our own engineers and plugin developers to trade tips and get your hands dirty with all the new capabilties in MT4. Thursday August 9, 10:30am PDT/1:30p EDT

Full details for each event will be posted on the MT.org community site, along with info non how to get connected with the community. And don’t worry, well be repeating these events after MT4’s official launch, as well. As a quick overview, we think the services your customers will be looking for in MT4 fall under a few categories:

• Installation and upgrades to get running on the new version
• Updates or information on related tools like web servers, databases, even desktop posting clients and design software
• Training and deployment for staff or bloggers who are moving to MT4
• Strategy or policy consulting for making the most of MT4’s new features, especially around community
• Improvements or upgrades to plugins to get compatible with MT4 and take advantage of the platform’s new abilities
• Preparation and planning for advanced uses of MT, such as providing solutions for advanced Enterprise and Community blogs
• Moving basic deployments of single blogs or one-off instances into centralized installs that can scale to large numbers of blogs
• Migration and configuration for bloggers moving from older versions of MT or from other platforms
• Helping customers who are still using hand-built pages, outdated templates that came with their hosting account, or obsolete custom-built tools move to MT4 for their content management needs