As part of my Movable Type 4.1 upgrade project, I noticed that depending on my template settings, republishing the whole site would get extremely slow. Movable Type sometimes catches flak for this because it’s designed to serve static pages, so the "build" time tends to be a bit slower. (A good tradeoff in my opinion.) There is much room for improvement on the rebuild times. It looks like the next release of Movable Type will focus on performance and scalability, so here’s my first contribution to that effort. After some trial and error, I discovered that the Archives sidebar widget…
SixApart just released a really interesting tool to help owners of Movable Type websites customize their style. To learn more, read the announcement on the blog – “Introducing the Movable Type Design Assistant” – or head directly to the design assistant and start playing with it. The assistant is a step-by-step wizard that starts with one of a few popular default templates, lets you choose from six standard column layouts, and tweak your CSS. At the end it shows clear directions for implementing your new design on your site. I liked the column layout in particular; it really makes it…
Just upgraded this site to Movable Type 3.36 following the recent security advisory. Upgrade process was smooth and all seems well at this point. I’m still working on upgrading everything to the latest version 4 — just need to dedicate some time to sit down and finish it. Once I get upgraded to version 4, I can start allowing OpenID login for comments. (Including Yahoo!, which just announced this yesterday.)
The open source version of the Movable Type publishing/blogging platform is launching today. See the announcement for more details (a podcast is also available): As of today, and forever forward, Movable Type is open source. This means you can freely modify, redistribute, and use Movable Type for any purpose you choose. It looks like the open source version (MTOS) has all the features and functionality of standard Movable Type 4 edition (MT4), but also includes other improvements and bug fixes. It sounds like the code was forked, “open-sourced”, and now released. The current MT4 product, along with the enterprise addon…
Continuing to experiment with my XAMPP setup (Apache, MySQL, Perl and PHP for Windows XP), I just installed Joomla, a popular open-source content management system. It only took about 10 minutes to install Joomla 1.0 using these steps: Visit the Joomla project page and download Joomla Extract the files to c:\xampp\htdocs, making sure to use the folder names inside the Zip file (if done correctly, you should have a file c:\xampp\htdocs\joomla\index.php) Open the local phpMyAdmin page and login as root Select Databases and create a database named joomla with encoding utf8_unicode_ci Select Privileges tab and create a user joomla and password of your choice,…