Got tired of the inconsistencies in my style sheet. Picked a pretty new one using StyleCatcher. Much, much better.
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Tag: blogging
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MT 3.2b3 Quick Thoughts
Six Apart continues to insist that there is not a party like their west coast part because the west coast party refuses to stop. Jay Allen et al have unleashed [MovableType 3.2b3](http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/beta/2005/08/mt32_beta_3.html), hopefully the last beta before release next week. While I don’t have a whole lot to add over [my last review](), I do have two things I thought were worth pointing out:
One, the new default template looks damn cool. You can check it out at [Thom’s blog](https://vjarmy.com/thom/), which I used the Template Refresh plugin to migrate over to the new look and feel with.
Two, 3.2 is now a big torchbearer for [Atom](http://www.atomenabled.org/); there’s a template for Atom 1.0 (which I’ve updated to), and the default “Subscribe to this blog’s feed” link now points to said atom feed. This is a big win in my book.
All in all, it’s been a very solid upgrade, and anyone who uses MT should feel very compelled to upgrade as soon as the proper release drops. Anyone who hasn’t looked at MT lately should definitely give it another chance after the release as well. Congrats, Jay (and team!), great work.
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Thoughts on Movable Type 3.2 Beta
I intalled MT 3.2b1 before I left for work this morning; I’ve had a bit of a chance to use it, and while I’m very impressed on a whole, there’s a few niggling points. Here’s the list:
+ The install process is considerably easier now. The mt CGI will automatically detect that it needs to do the upgrade, and will walk you through the steps. No more uploading, running, and deleting the 10 flavors of upgrade CGIs. Nice.
– The single distribution thing means that if you’re upgrading, you need to be extra careful. I remembered to not nuke my mt.cfg and DB password files, but not my plugins folder, losing the one custom plugin I’ve tweaked. D’oh.
+ The front page FINALLY shows the full range of quick links I’ve been waiting for:
This is in addition to a much revamped sidebar. Finally, I don’t feel like I have to dig a whole lot to get into the frequent places I need to hit on the install.
+++ The feedback spam settings actually work. I can’t believe it – no MT-Blacklist, no SpamLookup, and it’s successfully junking comments and trackbacks. The junk folder keeps the crap out of site/out of mind. Really nice.
– SpamLookup appears to be broken at the moment; I’d like to keep it just to flat out block the crap.
— I’d also like to see a way to set a system-wide feedback score tolerance; I’ve found that +3 works best for my blogs, and I’d like to be able to set this across all of them in one shot rather than going through by hand. I only had four blogs to do this to, but on larger installs this could be a real pain in the ass.
++ Aggregate views of entries/comments/trackbacks are awesome. The system-wide search is also awesome.
+ The ability to turn off comments and trackbacks for the entire site in one click is a godsend when a site is getting spambombed.
+ Individual plugin settings and activity logs per blog were much needed and quite useful.
— Comments aren’t showing up on the individual entries’ “Manage Comments” listing. Very strange.
= There’s a new advanced option to show a field where you can set the filename of an entry, but it doesn’t seem to be working for me.
– I keep running into issues where it says my login is invalid when I’ve saved my login with a cookie. Rather annoying, but hopefully easily fixed.
That’s all I’ve got for now. Cheers, Six Apart – it’s looking like it’ll be a great release. Just squash this small handful of bugs, and I’ll be a happy camper.