10 Features that Help Make You a Better Blogger and Publisher
Yesterday we started to list in greater detail all of the new features users will find in Movable Type 4.0. Today, we pick up where we left off and explore ten more features we introduced to help make Movable Type a more powerful publishing platform, while adding feature to make Movable Type easier to use then ever before.
- A powerful and simple re-sizable WYSIWYG Editor, with automatic saving of drafts of entries and templates -- never lose a half-written post again
- Built-in cross-blog aggregation: Publish pages that include data from some, all, or just one of your blogs
- The world's smartest template language, with boolean logic for choosing which content to display. ("Show me posts by 'Jane' in the category 'music' with tags 'bass NOT fish'.")
- Live preview shows you your entry before you publish, with full fidelity to your live blog
- Smart controls like auto-complete for tags, a calendar selector for scheduling future-dated entries, and a completely redone UI for selecting and creating categories
- Support for publishing standalone pages that automatically use blog templates and designs
- Better plain-text entry with built-in support for Markdown and Textile, and conversion of MS Word "smart" quotes to HTML entities
- Even more SEO-friendly with customizable URLs per entry, per-template, or per-page
- A simple integrated IDE for templates, with smart error reporting for template typos
- Paginated archives -- easily walk your users through posts by date or author or category
Sara
June 20, 2007 1:14 PM | Reply
About item 19:
Does that mean that we have "real" pagination of category archives and not just category by month?
Byrne Reese
June 20, 2007 3:25 PM | Reply
@Sara - By "real pagination" I think you are referring to the ability to break archives into multiple pages based upon an arbitrary number of entries, e.g. 10 entries per page.
Movable Type 4 does not support that with static publishing because the overhead for managing a set of pages that way is quite large. However in a dynamic publishing model, this overhead does not exist, and yes MT can in theory support that type of pagination model. Building that type of pagination into the core is on our roadmap, but is not a feature currently slated for MT4.
The compromise is to paginate by date, which has proven to be very effective in actually improving the performance of Movable Type, which is why we promote it so heavily.
Sara
June 20, 2007 3:48 PM | Reply
No problem Byrne.
BiginDC
June 20, 2007 7:57 PM | Reply
I've poked around a bit, trying to figure out #11, and all I've been able to find is the MTEntries blog_ids (though some documentation said it was only for MT Pro, not sure if that is still accurate). This mimics my current setup using MTMultiBlog. The flaw in MTMultiBlog (and this setup, from what I can tell) is that scheduled posts do not trigger a rebuild of the aggregating page. Is there something else I am missing that is supposed to do this aggregation? And when can we expect some more documentation so that we're not just winging it on all these new features you're touting?
I like the new look and feel of MT4, I hope it lives up to its promise (and that you can bring Media Manager over too!).
Jay Allen
June 22, 2007 2:20 PM | Reply
Sounds like an an excellent candidate for a bug report, regardless of whether you're doing something wrong or not.
Byrne, the feedback form is the appropriate place for bugs, is it not?
(Gee, I sure wish that nifty newly bundled Markdown plugin was in effect here in the comments.... Hint hint... :-)
BiginDC
June 26, 2007 5:29 AM | Reply
Well Jay, I wasn't sure that it was a bug report for MT4, which is why I was asking the question. It appears, from the latest post referencing Enterprise capabilities being rolled into MT4 core, that blog_ids is in fact the way that cross-blog aggregation is supposed to work. (However And now that I know that, I will submit a bug report as such. I just didn't want to file a bug report if I was doing something wrong in the first place. Hardly my fault, since the documentation was incorrect and still said the feature was only available to Enterprise users.
I guess my only point is that if you are touting new features, you should probably include some information to help your users figure out how to implement them. I wouldn't have even known where to begin to look for "cross-blog aggregation" if I hadn't already used MTMultiBlog (a third-party plug-in) which has a similar syntax.