Movable Type 4 beta 1

This morning I received over a dozen digest messages from Six Apart’s “ProNet” mailing list. Digests are once a day. Well, they should be. (Unfortunately, everyone uses the same python-based list manager, and it gets excited when subscribers get excited.) The big news is Movable Type 4.0 is in beta.

I installed it this morning before work. What’s nice:

  • The administrative interface is more streamlined looking. There’s a dashboard.
  • There is integration with authentication mechanisms other than typepad. Yes, my LJ Homies can use their own logins.
  • It will eventually be open source.
  • The option to ping blo.gs (RIP) is gone!

What’s rough:

  • The upgrade script ran into a couple of errors. I had to disable perl’s “strict” operation for the particular module. (I don’t remember which.) Once this was done, the “upgrade” ran in about a minute.
  • There are several dead-ends in the administrative interface. For example, you save a template and it says “Your template has been saved” (or somesuch). There are no links to do anything, leaving one to use the alt-back button. WordPress’ is to post a fancy confirmation in the window you’re editing. You never leave the page.
  • I could never get my individual archive templates to build. There is, unfortunately, no debugging information provided.

I rolled back to MT 3.35 this evening. (Thank goodness for backups.) I’ll try it again when it’s baked more.

1 thought on “Movable Type 4 beta 1”

  1. I know you had problems with it but so far I’ve been happy with my switch from MT to WordPress. I watch with great interest your continuing experiments with MT. You ever met anyone who knew too much software? 😉 I do like the idea of the automated list manager getting “excited” though. Happy little program sending messages out faster than a speeding byte.

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