Movable Type

Blog It: Connecting Social Networks and MT

2008-04-20T02:03:46Z

Last week marked the launch of an exciting new free service from Six Apart: Blog It. Powered by Movable Type's sibling service TypePad, Blog It is a Facebook application that lets you post to your Movable Type blog (as well as most other common blogging platforms) from right within Facebook. But a demonstration shows this better than words ever could:

Best of all, Blog It makes it easy to use a social network like Facebook to alert and notify your friends when you've published something new, combining the power of Movable Type's publishing capabilities with the distribution and connection of a popular social network. In that way, Blog It acts as the perfect counterpart to Movable Type's exclusive Action Streams, the free plugin that brings all of your social networking activity to your Movable Type blog. All of this is part of a larger effort for the Movable Type platform, which encompasses these two-way connections with social networks, powerful new standards like OpenID and OAuth for connecting sites together, and rich integration with exciting new web services like Yahoo Fire Eagle.

In combination, these features form a capability that could be called unified social networking: A unique set of Movable Type features that recognize that we all belong to many different services and social networks, and that a blog is the natural home for integrating those services together in an easy and open way. The goal? To give you control over your social networks. ReadWriteWeb, which is powered by Movable Type, published an astute analysis of Blog It:

SixApart is a leading company in the field of social graph experimentation and the most outspoken participating company willing to be critical of some of Google's efforts like OpenSocial. BlogIt is interesting beyond its basic functionality because it can tie together confirmed accounts on Facebook, outside blogs and Twitter - then place that information in the hands of a company dedicating significant time and resources to leveraging such information in the interests of users. BlogIt may be just a beachhead landed in the hostile territory not of Facebook, but of online identity chaos in general.

Of course, this is just the beginning. We're only on the first version of Blog It, and Action Streams is just getting started even with over 50 social networking services already supported. And all of this is just the latest step in the vision our CEO Chris Alden laid out for Movable Type in 2008: Open, Powerful and Easy. We can't wait to work with our amazing community to define what comes next.

Happy 10th birthday to Kottke.org

2008-03-14T17:13:20Z

There's a very small club of people who've been blogging for ten years; We talked to a number of these experts last year to celebrate Dave Winer's 10th anniversary as a blogger, with more posts discussing Leslie Harpold, Michael Sippey and Harold Check. Today, another respected member of the blogging community joins that esteemed club, and we're thrilled to congratulate Jason Kottke on ten years of blogging.

For the past 10 years, kottke.org has largely been all of the things people don't think of blogs as being: Carefully edited. Emotionally restrained. Even-handed. And yet, the site exemplifies all the things that drew so many of us to blogging in the first place: An elegant design, richly annotated with links, making smart use of its archives to add context and meaning.

Of course, we're Six Apart, so we're also proud that Jason blogs with Movable Type. Many of us at Six Apart consider Jason a friend and an influence and read his site regularly. So you could argue we're biased. Or you could simply argue that it's a testament to the fact that, if you have the talent, a blog can give a skinny kid from a small town in the middle of nowhere the ability to help inspire and influence an entire company, or even an entire industry.

Jason's work on the design of his blog has obviously been a huge influence on the design and voice of blogs overall. But that influence extends well past the simple visual design of blogs; Some fundamental parts of the structure of blogs that we now take for granted were innovations that Jason helped dream up and popularize. When we spoke to Paul Bausch five years ago about the creation of permalinks, one of the great things to come out of that conversation was the quiet influence Jason had in simply attaching anchors to each of his thoughts.

There's much more of course, from helping the linkblogging format take off, to being an early promoter of tumblelogs, Jason has stayed interested in the evolution of the core building blocks that make blogs so powerful. And the entire blogging world noticed when Jason started to experiment with a micropatronage model that let him stay an independent, opinionated publisher without the challenges that advertising presents.

We've even seen some really good criticisms and praise of Six Apart from Jason; He'd (rightly) criticized us at Six Apart for not blogging enough, and even for not doing enough to blow up the basic type-text-in-a-box paradigm that so much blogging technology has fallen in to. Jason has, of course, taken his fair share of lumps from the blogosphere too, from those who disagree with anything from his opinions to his business model. At the same time, there's been a great dialogue around insights like the idea that one of the key innovations in Vox wasn't merely the cool technology, but the way that community considerations were baked right in.

Finally, there's something to admire to Jason's being something like the Michael Jordan of blogging -- a talent who is consistently at the absolute top of the game for a full decade. It's easy to get some traffic just by being around a long time. But to be ten years on, and years past having already won a Bloggie for Lifetime Achievement, and still be named by the Guardian as the fourth most powerful blog in the world, and the highest-ranking one run by an individual, is a testament to the skills of one of our medium's true pioneers.

So, congratulations to Jason Kottke on celebrating 10 years of publishing kottke.org. Here's to the next ten years.

A WordPress 2.5 Upgrade Guide

2008-03-10T21:00:00Z

As you might know, WordPress 2.5 is about to be released, and we wanted to encourage WordPress users to upgrade. To Movable Type.

The truth is, there are lots of good blogging tools out there, and they're all good at different things. But since upgrading from older versions to WP 2.5 can mean changes to your themes, plugins ("print your plugins list"!), and site, we thought we'd take a minute to explain why it may make sense to make those changes in Movable Type instead. For those people in the blogging community who've never taken a look, or who haven't seen MT in a while, you might just find some surprises.

Get Better Tech First

If you're into the technology of blogging, you've probably been hearing about technologies like Atom and OpenID for a while, and paying attention to newer innovations from Action Streams to iPhone interfaces to OAuth. But for things like Atom and OpenID, WordPress users have had to wait months or even years to get capabilities that Movable Type has pioneered. If you want OpenID commenting support on your blog today, Movable Type has had it built right in since the initial launch of MT4 last year -- we got a little bit of a head start there because Six Apart is where OpenID was invented. And we're not resting on our laurels; support for the newly-updated OpenID 2.0 specification is coming to MT shortly as well. Powerful new web services connected by OAuth are also right around the corner, letting you to keep control of your password without having to share it all around the web just because you want to try out a new web service on your blog.

This kind of stuff isn't new for us: Movable Type was ~~the first~~ an early blogging platform to support plugins at all. [Update: As always, we should have assumed Dave Winer got there first -- Manila had plugins much earlier.] MT was the first to have support for Creative Commons built right in. And it's not just that we participate within existing open source communities to create new standards like Atom, OpenID 2, and OAuth, we also work with companies all over the web to be partners on the OpenSocial project and [a totally non-evil implementation of] Facebook's Beacon on TypePad. Basically, we think that playing well with others makes for a better platform.

Takes a Digging, Keeps on Ticking.

Question: How should you greet the onrush of visitors to your site when you get onto the homepage of Digg or Reddit? Answer: Not with a Database Connection Error. A lot of people have asked us over the years, "Why does MT default to generating static web pages?", even though there's the option to publish fully dynamic pages. The reason is clear, as WordPress core developer and Automattic employee Donncha O Caoimh says, "[U]nder high load, serving static html files will always trump dynamic PHP requests." With Movable Type, the default settings have always been set so that you have a site that's reliable right when you're about to get the most traffic, without having to hunt down, install, or configure any plugins. So when a crowd of people come to your site, they can read what you wrote (and click on your ads, if you're into that sort of thing) instead of wondering what everybody was looking at.

A Dashboard That Measures Success

One of the biggest goals in redesigning our dashboard for Movable Type 4 nearly a year ago was to get out of the habit of merely listing a bunch of recent entries, comments, and pages. The truth is, you need those listing screens to manage your blogs, but on a dashboard that stuff just ends up looking like another inbox full of clutter to manage. So MT4's completely customizable dashboard has a powerful set of visual representations of your blog's behavior, from charts of the number of entries your authors have created to sliders that let you zoom in and understand why you got more comments on certain days. And of course there are lots of third-party plugins for the MT dashboard, to integrate statistics and information from third-party services like your number of FeedBurner subscribers.

Design Matters

Movable Type was the first blogging platform to use completely CSS-styled, standards-based templates by default, and since then we've worked like crazy to give smarter, prettier tools to everybody for customizing design. We have a strong belief that creating a theme or editing a design shouldn't require knowing PHP or figuring out whether parameters go in the order of "format, before, after" or "before, after, format". In fact, template tags shouldn't be writing HTML markup for you at all -- so in MT, they don't. And the tools for managing and customizing those designs look as good as the designs themselves, as you can see with the Movable Type Design Assistant. The Assistant is designed to help regular bloggers think about their blog's design with some of the insights and perspectives of a professional designer. And the StyleCatcher system built into Movable Type lets you install styles from repositories on the web, without having to manually upload a bunch of theme files to your server.

Plugins Are Good. Not Needing Plugins Is Better.

As the platform that first popularized blogging plugins, Movable Type has tons of them. But even better, there are a huge number of features that would require either the installation and configuration of a plugin, or moving to a completely different platform like WP-MU if you were using WordPress. Instead of wasting time trying to install all those plugins, and then keeping up with the inevitable security updates for them, or compatibility updates whenever you upgrade your software, you can use MT's built-in features and just worry about what you want to say. Some of the key features that are built in to MT that you might want to try out:

Manage an unlimited number of blogs with one install
Share templates and widgets across all the blogs in your system
Easily manage tags
Upload, manage, and tag any kind of files with a complete Asset Manager
Lots more items that are still on the WordPress wishlist, like image resizing, searching of posts and pages, OpenID, a customizable dashboard, a better WYSIWYG editor, and more

And when you finally do want to do more with your site, in addition to all of the plugins which are available, you can also add in extensions to the platform like the Movable Type Enterprise Solution, for integrating with business-grade infrastructure, and Movable Type Community Solution, which enables features like user profiles, forums, Digg-style ratings, recommendations, and more.

Get Support Right From The Source

One of the signature features of Movable Type is perhaps the most hidden: Our excellent support. Instead of search around on Google for information that may or may not be out of date, or trying to figure out an obscure chat channel to get answers, paid users can simply file a help ticket and get access to the best support team in the business. It's just one more way to focus on what you want to say with your blog, instead of fighting with technology problems.

And Lots More To Come...

Now, the truth is, we're far from perfect. There are still a lot of times when MT installation takes a lot more than five minutes, though we're working on fixing that. (But of course, having a lot fewer security updates means you're not updating your blogging software all the time, so it can even out.) And MT can import all of your WordPress entries, comments, pages, and content with no problems. Right now, our whole developer community is focused on improving the raw performance of the core platform. But there are also still tons of new features we want to add to the platform as soon as possible. Whether it's adding support for OpenID 2.0, OAuth, or OpenSocial, making the application faster and more responsive, or working with the community to bring users new themes and plugins, we're 100% focused on our responsibility to continue to invent the future of blogging.

Movable Type is a blogging platform that's reliable, innovative, beautifully-designed and full-featured. Having spent years being both inspired and humbled by the creativity of the blogging community, we'd also like to point out that Movable Type might just be the right platform for a blogger like you.

Build Your Resume With Movable Type

2008-03-06T17:20:12Z

Movable Type is well-known for letting you easily build beautiful websites, but what may not be as obvious is that your Movable Type skills can help you build a successful career.

You see, a few years ago, for a lot of web professionals, it was good enough to say that you had knowledge about coding or markup or design or strategy. But these days, companies all over the world use Movable Type as a fundamental part of their business -- from media companies that rely on MT to publish content to Fortune 500 corporations that have integrated MT into the process of sharing information on an intranet.

As we've been investing in making Movable Type more scalable and reliable and bulletproof, we've also spent a lot of time explaining to companies how valuable their in-house MT experts are, because we know just how resourceful and innovative our community members can be. The great news is that these efforts are paying off. Take a look, for example, at the list of responsibilities on this recent job posting at the American Institute of Biological Sciences:

Maintaining and extending several Movable Type and PHP-based Web sites featuring science and biology-oriented content
Managing a junior staff member who's primary foci are end-user support for a staff of 15-30 and Web site maintenance
Serving as IT Department liaison to Department Managers (3-5) in the headquarters office, working to understand needs, propose effective solutions, arrive at consensus, and implement
Manage (and assist with management of) relationships/contracts with vendors supporting technology infrastructure for the headquarters office, and vendors assisting with technology project implementation
Assuming responsibility for technology infrastructure maintenance and growth for non-IT staff

Seeing the maintenance of a Movable Type publishing infrastructure as the first responsibility in a job description shows the transformation that's happened. We've come a long way from "I hope the new IT hire knows a little bit of HTML, too." And whether you're interested in hanging out with scientist at AIBS, or working for a major media company, or bootstrapping an up-and-coming new blog network, we're working to make sure that having "Experience with Movable Type" on your resume is something that distinguishes you from the rest of the field.

Talking Points Memo: A Blog Journalism Landmark

2008-03-01T02:15:31Z

This week marked a quiet, but significant, milestone for the world of journalism done through blogs: Joshua Micah Marshall's work on his widely-acclaimed Talking Points Memo was awarded a George Polk Award for Legal Reporting.

The Polk awards are astutely described by Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News as "the Golden Globes of American Journalism" on his Movable Type-powered blog. But the New York Times' Noam Cohen points out that Marshall's win, and indeed his team's work as a whole, offers a decided contrast to the hoary old cliché of the blogger as a pajama-clad guy with a more attitude than ideas.

To scores of bloggers, it was a case of local boy makes good. Many took it as vindication of their enterprise -- that anyone can assume the mantle of reporting on the pressing issues affecting the nation and the world, with the imprimatur of a mainstream media outlet or not. And most reassuringly, it showed that fair numbers of people out there were paying attention.

At Six Apart, we've always believed that blogs are nothing more, and nothing less, than a new medium, native to the web and nimbler than the ones that preceded it. That means that, even though people have been falsely debating "blogs vs. journalism" for the better part of a decade, the truth has always been that this is just another medium in which a great journalist can do great work.

We're thrilled that a distinguished member of our community has set this precedent. We know that it's only a matter of time until similar honors, such as the Pulitzer Prizes, understand that it's not the choice of medium that makes a work legitimate, but rather the efforts of those who care about sharing their ideas that define a work. And we build tools like Movable Type with the hope that they can be one small part of helping talented teams like the TPM staff achieve work that not only is on par with, but indeed can even eclipse, the best journalism in the world. Though it's an infinitely smaller tribute in comparison to a Polk award, we'd be remiss if we didn't mark the moment by naming Talking Points Memo as a Movable Type Featured Blog.

One footnote: As Joshua Marshall himself noted after his win, a big part of why he's been able to do so much with Movable Type is due to the help of an incredible team that typifies what the MT community is capable of: Apperceptive. He says, "[T]hey come with our strong recommendation. And if you're looking for people who do this kind of work I'd be happy to answer your questions about our experience." And as fellow MT blogger Jason Kottke notes, Apperceptive is "the little engine that runs a large chunk of the professional blogosphere". So our congratulations as well to the team that helps MT power some of the biggest sites in the blogosphere.

Serious About Design

2008-02-22T14:56:10Z

One of the fundamental goals for Movable Type for almost seven years now has been to advance the state of design on the web. Some of the recent developments from the MT community highlight how that attention to aesthetics is alive and well.

First, as we described on the company news blog recently, we've made the Design Assistant for Movable Type available as a completely free design resource for the MT community. While the process of creating the Assistant was gratifying, we think it's just as important to look at the design-oriented philosophy behind its creation:

It's easy to make tools to create a design, but it's far harder to create tools that help you get in the mindset of making good tradeoffs.

So today we bring you the Design Assistant for Movable Type. Sure, you can click through it and knock out a cool custom design really quickly. But along the way, you'll start to see how a few common grid/column layouts can impact the way your content is perceived. The Assistant creates finished designs, but you're also encouraged to click on individual page elements and understand the CSS cascade that informs their styling. The last step isn't merely when a particular design is applied to your blog -- the last step is actually the start of learning more, from a broad selection of hand-picked learning resources.

But as with everything in design, it's not merely about the ideas that influence the work, it's about the experience of seeing a design in action. So try out the Design Assistant for yourself and see what it inspires you to create.

Of course, in a community full of smart designers, inspiration can come from the creativity you find in other MT sites. It's something we think about for the Movable Type community worldwide, as our European team has shown recently on its blog, too. And Aaron Bailey of 601am, the highly-regarded blog development shop, has helped make it easier than ever to find and share beautiful Movable Type-powered sites, with the launch of Movable Love.

Movable Love is brand new, but already features tons of clever and unique MT sites, each of which can help inspire your own designs to new heights. And once you've got that beautiful new site built, you'll want to make sure and submit it to the growing collection over at Movable Love.

Movable Type 4.1: Power to the People.

2008-01-24T18:43:46Z

Here's the story: Movable Type 4.1 continues the amazing momentum that the Movable Type platform showed in 2007, when we released MT4, offered up the one-two punch of the Enterprise Solution and Community Solution, and capped off our best year ever with the release of MTOS, Movable Type Open Source.

So what's next? Movable Type 4.1, a free update for all users of MT4. A stable release of Movable Type Open Source. The new Professional Pack, packed with industrial-strength content management power. And a new personal license for the MT Community Solution. More power, more potential, and more personalization. There are dozens of new features in MT 4.1, and even more unique capabilities if you opt to add on one of the packs we've made available to the community. Improvements for writing and managing assets make MT easier to use than ever, smarter tools for managing and create templates make MT's publishing even more powerful, technical improvements to APIs and the templating language extend MT's tradition of technological innovation, and support for user avatars and new add-ons for community features help turn your MT-powered site into a real community.

And then there's the new add-ons, like the Professional Pack which gives you the ability to customize the data fields for your entries, pages, users, and even categories and folders. Bundled with the smart new Universal Template set, you can build a business website in minutes, and completely control the entry forms you use to publish. Plus, the Community Solution, which we announced to a fantastic response late last year, will shortly be available for personal users, letting you add forums, profiles, user-submitted posts and more to your blog, all wrapped up in a gorgeous new set of specially-designed templates.

Write. Now. We've cleaned up the screen where you write your entries, making the layout even smarter and easier to understand, and showing useful info like when a post was created as well as when it was published, and even if it's been edited, which is handy if you've got multiple people reviewing your content. There's even a convenient link for sharing your entries once they're published, with a friendly box for entering your recipient's email addresses, and automatic integration with MT's address book.

Template Sets. The smartest templating system in blogging just got even smarter -- you can now install entire sets of templates, which control the output of your published content, styles, and even your XML feeds all at once. The Professional Pack (see below) includes a killer template set, but you'll be able to get template sets from the MT community at large, as well. And with new plugins, you can even create and distribute or sell your own sets. Learn more about Template Sets.

Template Sanity! Ever drive yourself nuts trying to look up the right tag to use in your templates, or get frustrated trying to share elements between your different blogs or sites? No more. Global templates make it easy to share widgets or even entire templates between two, twenty, or two hundred different blogs or sites in your MT install. And intelligent tag help automatically provides you with a link to the appropriate help documentation for the template tags you use -- right within the Movable Type interface. And all that is on top of MT4's smart syntax-highlighting rich template editor, which even prompts you for the right template tags to insert while you're editing.

The best API support in the business. MT was the first blogging platform with Atom support, and now we've got full support for the IETF Atom Publishing Protocol (RC5023) standard. Plus, we've beefed up MT's API support with the ability to create, edit, and manage pages through third-party clients like Windows Live Writer, just like you've been able to do with entries.

Get a handle on your assets. Still struggling with an old blogging system that doesn't even help you manage your files and images? Then it's time to jump to MT4.1, which improves MT4's powerful asset management system with new screens that show you every time an asset has been used. ("This PDF is linked to in 3 of your entries." "Two of your pages have this image inserted." "This audio file hasn't been used.") And you can bulk-manage your assets, making it just a few clicks to add tags to as many files as you want.

Show us your pics! Short for "User pictures", and also known as avatars, Userpics are built in to the system, and you can use them on your published entries, and even on your comments. And Userpics have all the power of MT4's asset management system, so you can upload, manage, and tag them just like you would any other image or photo in your system. Seeing the faces (or icons) of the members of your community goes a long way towards creating a sense of "belonging", and makes it easy to identify the regulars that help your blog's community thrive.

Some crazy next-generation geeky stuff! This one's an experimental feature, just for the geeks: As of MT 4.1, the Movable Type templating language is now Turing Complete. MT 4.1 introduces some new looping constructs, additional variable types (like hashes and arrays) and control flow structures like If-ElseIf-Else). You can finally port Tetris to the MT template language!

The whole damn thing is faster, and can take whatever traffic you throw at it. With all the new features in MT4, we've had to work hard to make sure the speed of managing and publishing your site stays peppy. So MT 4.1 introduces a number of new performance enhancements, like blog search results that are significantly more speedy. And as always, MT defaults to publishing standard, scalable plain HTML documents for your entries -- so you can enjoy the attention when your blog gets on Digg, instead of worrying about whether your web host is going to yell at you, or having to figure out a technical solution just to handle the traffic.

But wait, there's more!

As we mentioned with the release of Movable Type Open Source, we want to make sure our paying users know they're getting the most bang for their buck. So we're launching the Professional Pack, a benefit for all users who purchase a supported commercial license. And soon, it will be joined by a new personal license for the Community Solution, that makes it easy for you to get the power of full-featured forums, rich community blogs, and slick new member profiles for your personal blog. (In the meantime, you can check out the screencast to find out what's in the Community Pack.)

Packed With Power

The Pro Pack lets you flex your creative muscles with MT, turning the world's most powerful blogging platform into a full-fledged content management system. Some of the highlights:

Universal Template Set for Business Websites. Your company or project can get up and running with a professionally designed website using MT's new content management features using the new universal template set. Just click to start a new site and you're automatically provided with a beautiful homepage, default pages for common information like an About page or a Contact page, and a full-featured blog. Even better, you can start customizing the content of any section of the site just by clicking on it.

Custom Fields. Now you've got complete control over the fields that you use to publish your site. Extend your entries and pages with drop-down lists, radio buttons, or just plain text fields. Add additional fields to your author's profiles, giving you more information about the contributors on your site. And you can even tweak the fields used to describe your system's folders and categories, storing any details you want to keep track of. Plus, field customization even extends to letting you easily rearrange the fields in any posting form through drag-and-drop, so you can make sure authors have the easiest experience possible.

Thank You

We've been thrilled by the incredible amount of support and attention that the community's given to MT, especially during the MT 4.1 beta. The hard work has paid off -- the launch of MT 4.1 also marks the first official stable release of Movable Type Open Source. But most of all, as we said with the launch of the MT4.1 Beta, it's just getting started. After more than six years, it's exciting to see that Movable Type is still helping you do amazing things by putting the power of personal expression into the hands of an amazing community

Movable Type Security Update

2008-01-15T20:46:25Z

Today we are releasing a mandatory security update for all Movable Type users, to address a potential security issue which has been reported by a third party. A detailed description of the vulnerability can be found later in this post, but to summarize: In affected versions of Movable Type, there are certain circumstances in which a blog template may be rendered dynamically via CGI in an otherwise static publishing context. If you use Movable Type to publish PHP files (or JSP or ASP pages) and have embedded within your Movable Type templates sensitive information (such as database connection information), then that sensitive information could potentially be exposed and viewed publicly. There is no record of a customer having been affected by this vulnerability. Here's the Update Advisor, a simple scorecard to let you evaluate this new release.

Movable Type Update Advisor: Version 4.01a and 3.36

Release Type: Security Release. The potential vulnerability has not yet been exploited in the wild.
Mandatory? This is a mandatory update for all users of Movable Type.
Performance Implications: None.
Plugins Affected: None.
Templates Affected: No changes in your templates are required.
System Requirements: This release has no new or additional system requirements.
Licensing considerations: None. MT 4.01a and MT 3.36 are free updates for users of any version of MT 4 or 3.3.
Upgrade Fatigue: No planned updates are scheduled until the release of MT4.1, which is currently in beta. There will be no further releases before MT 4.1 unless significant security issues are found which require a 4.0x release. It has been 116 days since the last recommended update to MT4 and 273 days since the last recommended update to MT3.

Downloads are available in your account for current customers or through the download page.
In addition to the updates to Movable Type 4.01a for MT4 users and Movable Type 3.36 for MT3 users, we have issued updates to Movable Type Enterprise and to the Movable Type Community Solution and Enterprise Solution. If you are on one of these platforms, you should be contacted by your account representative about these updates shortly. We also recognize that many Movable Type users are still running version 3.2. If you are running version 3.2, you can download a Comments.pm. Please note that this patch is only intended for use with Movable Type version 3.2. While we routinely perform security evaluations and do regular testing of Movable Type, and strive to make Movable Type as secure and reliable as possible, we sometimes have to release these updates in order to address issues found outside the course of our scheduled testing and release process. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience of having to update your software.]]> Detailed Description When a script is executed on a web server it can only be processed by a single interpreter (e.g. Perl, PHP, Java, etc). In other words, a perl script cannot output PHP code that can then subsequently be processed by the PHP interpreter later in the request chain. Scripts should therefore only output content intended for a browser. In Movable Type this may pose a problem when the Individual Entry Archive template is used to output static PHP (or JSP, ASP, etc) files to the file system. In the event that these templates are processed dynamically and displayed via a CGI then the server side code that they contain will become visible to the outside world. This can only occur when the Individual Archive Template is used to display comments dynamically. There is an additional script in use by a very small number of users called mt-view.cgi which exhibits a similar behavior. Generally speaking, this in and of itself may not pose a security threat, unless of course your templates output sensitive information intended to be processed by the server only, such as a database connection information or other sensitive information.

Versions Affected

All versions of Movable Type released since 3.2 (inclusive) are affected by this vulnerability.

Applying the Fix

* Users of Movable Type 4.01 can install the updated Movable Type 4.01a. * Users of Movable Type 3.3x can install the updated Movable Type 3.36. * Users of Movable Type 3.2 can replace Comments.pm (found in /path/to/mt/lib/MT/App/) with a patched version of Comments.pm. In addition, users of all versions of Movable Type are encouraged to remove the script entitled mt-view.cgi. Learn more about Upgrading Movable Type 4 or Upgrading Movable Type 3 in the MT documentation.

Six Apart Japan's "Newspaper Blog" wins Good Design Award

2007-12-01T15:18:57Z

We're pleased to note that a Japanese language Movable Type-based Newspaper Blog product has been selected for a Good Design Award by the Japan Industrial Design Promotion Organization, a group that has been recognizing and awarding good design in such fields as consumer goods, industrial products, public facilities, and even ecological activities since 1957. This is the first time any blog-related product has won this award.

The Newspaper Blog product was created jointly with Matsuno Lab of Chuo University in March of this year to improve the information literacy of Japanese elementary school children. The idea behind the product is to have students research stories, write their own articles, and create a newspaper, and in the process develop an appreciation for newspapers. The design and content management capabilities of Movable Type enable the students to easily publish an online or print newspaper while learning valuable computer skills and gaining first-hand experience on how a blog enhances communication.

Matsuno Lab has worked on various projects in the past to improve students' information literacy. Matsuno and Six Apart teamed up in this case to develop the Newspaper Blog using the Movable Type Enterprise Publishing Pack. Students who worked on these newspapers reported that besides it being a fun project, they wanted to continue publishing, and felt more interest in reading newspapers.

The Newspaper Blog is not just for schools - it's available to Japanese businesses for internal communications pieces like department newsletters, and for external uses like marketing campaigns.

Here's a picture of one of several newspapers built on Movable Type. This is from Hamagawa Elementary School in Okinawa. Didn't the kids do a nice job?

(Click on image to see the whole front page.)

Who is the superest hero of them all?

2007-11-16T09:21:07Z

Every hero needs a nemesis. Today's Movable Type Featured Blog, The Superest, catalogs a neverending game of illustrative oneupsmanship, with a series of charming and clever drawings that follow two simple rules:

Player 1 draws a character with a power.
Player 2 then draws a character whose power cancels the power of that previous character. Repeat.

It's madness, genius and super powers, all in one slick site, with an effusive community of fans who are understandably enthusiastic about each day's drawings. It's the kind of clever blogs that we love, showing off the fact that you cancompletely change the design and aesthetics people expect from a blog, and publish content that's rich and expressive, and end up with a result that's a real winner. Well, at least until tomorrow's hero defeats it.

The Superest is the brainchild of the Philadelphia superhero team-up of Kevin Cornell, whom you may know from his drop-dead-gorgeous Movable Type-powered blog Bearskinrug, and Matt Sutter, whom you can find sharing his works and wares at InkFinger.

The Communities That Web 2.0 Forgot

2007-11-14T09:00:05Z

There are a lot of web conversations that are out there struggling.

On cluttered bulletin boards, ghost-town forums, and decrepit old message boards, a lot of conversations that have nowhere else to live are puttering along. We've all seen them -- you do a quick Google search on some esoteric topic and end up poking around a community that seems to have been left behind by the advances in usability, conversation, and interactivity that we're used to in blogs and social media sites. There's no sign of the rich media or social profiles we're used to seeing today. Or maybe that out-of-date community is powering the forums on your company intranet, looking like The Community That Web 2.0 Forgot. Though the currently-popular phrase "User-Generated Content" isn't very elegant, at least it has the word "user" in it.

Well, we haven't forgotten about the millions of conversations that happen on the parts of the web that today's modern blogs don't yet reach. So we're proud to launch the Movable Type Community Solution, a powerful set of features that sits on top of the rock-solid core of Movable Type 4, to help you use the platform to power rich, thriving social media sites that combine the power of blogs, forums, and real community.

You can create all the features you'd expect from a forum or social media site, in just a few clicks. Easily let anyone register for your site, create a new topic of discussion with a few clicks, and comment on or subscribe to the threads they're interested in. And we've taught those old sites a few new tricks: Registration can happen through your existing blog accounts, or using the hundreds of millions of OpenID identities out there on the web. Creating a topic or forum thread can include rich media and file attachments, or anything else that you'd put into a blog entry, and those assets are automatically incorporated into MT4's built-in asset management system. Instead of just subscribing to a thread, you can mark posts and threads as favorites, or rate and rank them, Digg-style.

Using a powerful platform like MT even lets you do age-old tasks in smart new ways. Instead of silliness like "pinning" a post to the top of the forum saying "Important! Please read our forum policy!", just use MT4's built in Pages feature to create a Policy page or a FAQ and show it in your navigation. Isn't that a lot more sensible?

And then there's the part that's completely new: Real social media profiles, for every member of your site. Naturally, members can customize their names and profile pictures, but it doesn't stop there -- profiles show the blog posts you've written, the forum topics you've started, the comments you've left on any part of the site, the threads or posts you've marked as favorites, and the conversations that started as a result of your contributions. Think about it: Your profile is your resume in the community. If every comment you've contributed gets lots of positive replies from the community, a site administrator can use MT4's built-in permissions to promote you to a blog author, or even to an administrator. And if you're managing a site and someone's profile shows that they're only ever causing trouble in a thread, it's easy to take appropriate action.

MTCS also lets forums finally benefit from the kind of simple, powerful customization that bloggers have always taken for granted. Use MT's familiar templating language to choose exactly how your forums look (we've got a clean design that works right out of the box, of course) and even use modern tools like widgets to trick out your forums with the latest features. Unlike most forum applications, MT's web addresses are search engine-friendly, making it easy for readers to find your site content, and MT's built-in search and tag clouds work across all your blogs, forums, and pages.

Customization doesn't end there. For the first time, MTCS offers system-level templates -- shared navigation, ad units, or header and footers for all your blogs and forums are a snap. You can even completely customize the system emails generated by MTCS, using the same powerful template editor that's won raves for MT4. And everything in MTCS supports customizable fields: Entries, pages, categories, folders, and users.

There's lots more, of course. But right now, we're most excited to see what innovative new kinds of communities spring up using the combination of familiar forums for participation and this powerful new user experience enabled by the Movable Type Community Solution. It's going to yield some amazing results, but don't take our word for it -- take a look at some of the early reviews:

"Six Apart is Fixing Forums", a typically insightful look from CNET's Rafe Needleman at Webware and News.com:

There are other forums tools for sites and blogs ... but the Six Apart product, called the Movable Type Community Solution, is the first that I know of that integrates this tightly into a blogging platform. ... I'm intrigued by the new integrated forums in Movable Type. Forums are hugely useful sources of information and community on many sites, but they are rarely well-integrated, easily managed, or indexed well by search engines.

"Why Six Apart's Community Platform will matter to brands", a quick, smart overview from Forrester's Jeremiah Owyang:

Six Apart has announced they are launching a community platform for brands to use. A company already focused on openness, social graph, opensocial, and OpenID, I'll expect that brands will have full access to their data, and users will also have control over their information. ... Six Apart has three things going for them: 1) Brand recognition: companies that have already deployed a social media program have already looked or used their blogging tools. 2) Experience. With Vox, a form of a more secure social network site previously launched, the hopes are the company has worked out any bugs to extend this tool to brands. 3) Movable Type: Reading between the lines, I suspect this is an 'upsell' opportunity for existing MT users, which is a good move for them as they already have a strong footprint with existing customers.

"MT Community Solution: Blogs Meet Forums 2.0", from Duncan Riley at TechCrunch:

SixApart has launched a new version of the their Movable Type (MT) blogging platform, Movable Type Community Solution (MTCS) that takes blogging into the realms of forum hosting, with some nice 2.0 touches.

There are some other nice nods around the web, from Mashable to Wired. And keep your eyes open for an upcoming MTCS-powered community that's still in beta right now, but is close to our hearts: A completely revamped version of our own Movable Type Community Forums.

Social Media Success, and Free Resources

2007-10-31T20:38:25Z

We're amazed and excited by the incredible turnout for yesterday's online seminar, Enterprise 2.0: Using Social Media in the Workplace, which we co-presented with Forrester. The hundreds of enthusiastic responses and active participants who attended really show just how much potential there is for businesses to make the most out of social media tools such as blogging.

If you attended the seminar, you'll want to check out the wide array of resources that we've created, beginning with a one-hour streaming video of the entire presentation, complete with audio and the slides that attendees could view. You can also download a series of PDF documents:

A Movable Type Product Overview
Our Six Apart Guide to Business Blogging, a free book documenting best practices for your company
And a complete copy of the Presentation Slides

And then be sure to sign up for a live demo of Movable Type -- space is limited, and demo slots are going quickly, so be sure to sign up for your preferred time as early as you can.

During the course of the Seminar yesterday, we also got a bunch of great questions from the audience, and weren't able to answer all of them during the short amount of time we had. So, we've grabbed a few of the more common ones to answer here.

Q: Can disagreement among blog commenters sometimes be beneficial to an organization, or is it always better to nip arguments in the bud?

6A: This really depends on your community and the conversation at hand. Inside an organization, if you're blogging on an intranet, people will generally be pretty civil because of the social pressure to act appropriately around coworkers. On a public blog, you can often keep even a contentious conversation from becoming uncivil by simply requiring some form of identification from your commenters. But platforms like Movable Type have very robust tools for moderating conversations -- if you see a topic that's really becoming heated, you can always set comments to be moderated by default, and then publish only the comments that are appropriate. It's a lot easier to err on the side of being more restrained and then open up over time than it is to try to shut things down after the fact. For more, see "Control Your Comments: It's Your Lobby", or consult the Six Apart Guide to Business Blogging, which has an entire chapter on creating a commenting policy.

Q: When should we use blogs or wiki software? What's the difference?

6A: Blogs and wiki software are very complementary tools, with slightly different goals. Platforms like Movable Type give you the rich ability to easily update web pages, host conversations, store media assets, and create standalone web pages, all within the easy experience of a blogging platform. Wikis are a great supplement to these kinds of tools if you want to add in the ability to have a number of people collaborate on a document to reach a consensus. In contrast, blogs are a great tool for providing status updates or for discussing topics where multiple individual viewpoints can be useful.

One major social consideration in deploying these tools is that since most wiki tools allow anyone to edit a document, contributors can be concerned about getting appropriate credit (or blame!) for their contributions, and discussions where people have opposing viewpoints can become difficult, resulting in successive edits to replace other people's content. Those caveats aside, wikis and blogs enhance each other's functionality, and page 9 of the Business Blogging Guide offers a more in-depth compare-and-contrast look at the two technologies. If you're looking for a platform that integrates these tools, you should consider SuiteTwo, an Intel-led Web 2.0 suite for the Enterprise which incorporates wikis as well as using Movable Type as its flagship best-of-breed blogging component.

Q: We've decided to launch a few blogs as a trial project, but how should we promote them or get more people reading them?

6A: The right techniques for promoting a blog vary widely, depending on what audience you're trying to reach. Inside an organization, you should take advantage of the other channels that people are already using to get information. Include links to your blog in company newsletters, list your blog's web address in your email signature, and display recent headlines from your blog on your company's intranet homepage. (Most portal software applications let you include RSS feeds pretty easily.)

If your'e trying to reach an audience outside your company, you'll want to use all the traditional methods for promoting any communications channel. Make sure all of your staff members who talk to customers or the public know about your blogs and are comfortable describing them to others. Don't be shy about including your blog's address on your business cards, in any materials that are included with your products, or even on direct-mail communications or in print ads. Every channel that you reach your audience with now has the potential to become a two-way ongoing conversation through your blog.

Thanks again to everyone who participated in the web seminar yesterday. Please be sure to check out the seminar resources we've posted, and if you want to be the first to know of similar free events in the future, subscribe to our feed and we'll keep you in the loop on upcoming events.

No, Enterprise Software Doesn't Have To Suck

2007-10-25T20:25:32Z

Every so often, we get some great feedback from our community that's thought-provoking and challenges our assumptions in a good way. And then sometimes, we get blog posts from otherwise-clueful folks who've, well, missed the mark. Fortunately, people with a lot of talent are usually pretty good at taking criticism, and that's certainly true of Khoi Vinh, design director for NYTimes.com and author of the popular Subtraction blog, and Jason Fried, a principal of 37Signals and one of the key voices of their Signal vs. Noise blog.

The conversation got started in earnest last week -- Khoi posted "If It Looks Like a Cow, Swims Like a Dolphin and Quacks Like a Duck, It Must Be Enterprise Software" on his Movable Type-powered blog. The title's a playful jab at an odd little Lotus Notes ad campaign, but overall the essay does a great job of showing what's traditionally been wrong with enterprise software. Jason picked up the baton from there, with characteristic humility, offering up "Why Enterprise Software Sucks".

Honestly, their criticisms are mostly fair, though picking on these hundred-year-old companies for making software that's not very usable seems like kind of taking a cheap shot. But let's place the blame appropriately: If Enterprise software sucks, it's because the people who know how to do things right haven't gotten off their asses and fixed it.

We say this because, hey, what do you know -- we're trying to fix it. As Khoi, or Jason, or anybody else can attest, Six Apart's background is undoubtedly in the world of being real, credible, serious long-time contributors to blogging and social media. (That's part of why we've been glad to see the successes of these two, among so many others, who come from that world.) But we have an ambition, an actual mission, to honor that community by bringing the potential to everyone who can benefit. And that mission doesn't stop at the door to your office.

Khoi gets the heart of the issue:

[E]nterprise software rarely gets critiqued the way even a US$30 piece of shareware will. It doesn't benefit from the rigor of a wide and varied base of users, many of whom will freely offer merciless feedback, goading and demanding it to be better with each new release. Shielded away from the bright scrutiny of the consumer marketplace and beholden only to a relatively small coterie of information technology managers who are concerned primarily with stability, security and the continual justification of their jobs and staffs, enterprise software answers to few actual users. Given that hothouse environment, it's only natural that the result is often very strange.

We've raised the same point in our own conversations with companies -- having a robust, thriving community of millions of individuals blogging with our platforms in their personal lives makes our business and Enterprise software simply work better. Want to make sure your enterprise blog platform will scale? Take what we've learned from helping scale some of the largest communities on the web. Like the control and flexibility of open source, with the familiarity and support of a traditional software license? Our communities have demanded both.

Put simply, if the term Enterprise 2.0 means anything at all, then it has to mean enterprise software that meets the user experience standards set by the tools we use in our free time. Anything less will fail.

And ultimately, it comes back to our mission. Since both Khoi and Jason are designers, and we're a company co-founded by a designer, we know full well that experience matters. As a company, we think Six Apart has an obligation to provide as great an experience in enterprise software as people get when reading NYTimes.com or using 37Signals' productivity tools. This is a point we've kept coming back to in talking about why business blogs matter so much:

[W]hile those of us who work on our own or for smaller companies can say "Well, I want to work on a Mac." or "I'm only going to use Firefox." or "I'm only going to use open source applications." (and most of us at Six Apart fall into those camps), most non-technical people not only don't have that option, they don't care enough to find out how to do that stuff. You use what your boss tells you to, and even if you have other preferences, they're not worth the fight when you're just trying to get your job done.

So, instead of having to use some horrible "Groupware Knowledge Management Content Solution Server" thing, we think people should be able to use real blogs from a company that actually cares about blogging. And to do that, we have to make blogging tools feel "safe" to bosses and CIOs and CTOs and IT departments and other offices full of people whose job it is to say "no" to anything too new or unproven.

Of course, we owe a big thanks to Khoi and Jason for starting a good conversation, but let's not concede that enterprise software just sucks intrinsically. Let's assume that, just like the web itself has been reinvented and reinvigorated by social software in the past half-decade, the way we collaborate and create at work will be, too. It's a point that all of us who work on enterprise social software at Six Apart take pretty personally, and there might be no better way to show how personal communications platforms can also be serious business tools than to use this business blog post to highlight a point I'd made on my personal blog:

Anyone who creates technologies that aspire to have significant cultural or social impacts on the developed world has to focus on both our lives at home and our lives at work. Anything less is an abdication of potential, or a failure of ambition, and settling for less denies many people the chance to discover tools or technologies that can improve their lives.

So the solution to having to use bad tools at work isn't to merely shrug your shoulders and complain about it -- the answer is to get even more ambitious, raise your standards, and start using software that's both a delight to work with and proven to help build your business.

Still skeptical? Join us on Tuesday for the free seminar we're hosting with Forrester's best Enterprise 2.0 experts -- we'll show you how to make the case for your boss, your team, your employees, and your business.

ScienceBlogs: Half a Million Strong

2007-10-22T22:44:28Z

Some of the most fundamental tools for scientists are numbers and measurements, and one of the most powerful fundamentals of the scientific method is the concept of publishing one's results. It's no wonder, then, that Movable Type is a popular tool for scientists to share information, and that they're eager to celebrate measurable milestones. ScienceBlogs, the vibrant community of bloggers hosted by Seed Magazine, recently marked an amazing accomplishment: Their community, in less than two years, has hit half a million comments submitted on the thriving site. In honor of the milestone, and the remarkable amount of information and education that the scientists and authors on the site have shared with their community, ScienceBlogs is today's Movable Type Featured Site.

Of course, the ScienceBlogs community is a sterling example of what Movable Type can do, but we're hardly the first to notice. Another (slightly less scientific) bit of data that we enjoyed observing last year was Nature magazine's look at science blogs, which we analyzed to reveal that 60% of Nature's most popular science blogs are powered by Movable Type. More important as a measure of success is the incredible things that ScienceBlogs readers are learning by having direct access to working scientists. One great demonstration of this is that ScienceBlogs has its own DonorsChoose challenge, supporting science education in schools, as part of the Blogger Challenge which we've also been promoting at Six Apart.

Congratulations to the ScienceBlogs team, and to the entire ScienceBlogs community for reaching this milestone, and we'll be keeping a careful eye on the site to watch for many more milestones to come.

Making the Business Case for Social Media

2007-10-20T12:07:03Z

What's it finally going to take to convince your company (or just your boss) to use blogs and other social media as business tools? Well, we're providing the chance to talk to some of the experts who really understand these opportunities, for free. We've built our own business using blogs, and helped more companies succeed with social media in the enterprise than anyone else -- now we want to show you how to do it, too.

On Tuesday, October 30th, we're hosting a web seminar, entitled "Enterprise 2.0: Using Social Media in the Workplace", and we'll be joined by two of the world's most experienced experts in the realm of Enterprise 2.0, Forrester analysts Charlene Li and Rob Koplowitz. This is practical, real-world stuff -- examples of how businesses are using these tools today, case studies based on efforts that have already succeeded, and best practices you can implement in your organization right now. You'll be able to ask questions that directly relate to your own planning efforts, and get valuable information about how to measure the success of your own Enterprise 2.0 or social media initiatives.

Some of the key things you'll learn:

New research about social media trends in the enterprise
Specific examples of how blogs and other Web 2.0 technologies are being used
Details of how to implement Web 2.0 in an era of governance, risk, compliance and privacy
How to measure results

Space for the web seminar is filling up quickly -- check out movabletype.com/webinar to registar for the seminar.