MT4: Managing Your Media

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.