Partners: Get Ready for MT4

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