Although it isn't released yet (estimated release date is August 31st), Movable Type has announced a few upcoming features for MT 3.1.
New features include: Dynamic PHP publishing, Post scheduling, Subcategories and Application-level callbacks.
There will also be a plug-in pack based on the winners of the $20,000 contest they held recently. Bundled plug-ins include: MT-Blacklist, XSearch/Plus, KoalaRainbow, MultiBlog, Markdown and Notifier.
Personally I'm most interested in working more with the latest MT-Blacklist and checking out MultiBlog and Notifier.
I'll just quote the highlights from the Movable Type's blog entry. It pretty much all speaks for itself.
First, here's a quick summary of what’s new, followed by a longer explanation of what it all means.Posted by jen on July 27, 2004 at 12:20 PMKey new features in Movable Type 3.1:
- Dynamic PHP publishing, controllable on a per-template basis: You can control whether you publish a dynamic or static page on a per-template basis, letting you balance the publishing and traffic for your weblog. For example, high-demand documents like XML syndication files can be static, for maximum speed and lower server load, and individual post archives can be dynamic, eliminating the need to rebuild pages when making a global template change.
- Post scheduling: Allows authors to set a time and date for posts to appear, permitting automatic updates to your weblog. Keep your weblog community up to date even if you're not at your computer to create new posts.
- Subcategories: A new category management interface gives you fine-grained control over the organization and display of your posts. You can even easily move a subcategory from one parent category to another.
- Application-level callbacks: Plugin developers get even more control, allowing plugins the ability to hook events like rebuilding and extend them with custom functionality.
In addition to the above features, we'll be releasing a plugin pack for Movable Type 3.1, featuring these winning plugins from our Plug In to Movable Type contest:
- MT-Blacklist: A comprehensive spam-blocking and management system for comments and TrackBacks, with an advanced interface and remote importing of blacklist entries.
- XSearch/Plus: A system which allows you to plug in alternate search engines for Movable Type. This includes a working implementation of a powerful Plucene-based search engine.
- KoalaRainbow: A visualization engine for Movable Type which uses its own query language to generate graphics based on arbitrary queries of data in your Movable Type system.
- MultiBlog: A plugin which allows you to include template content from one weblog in any other weblog in your Movable Type install, including full control over whether an update in one blog should trigger a rebuild in another.
- Markdown: A simple text markup language which allows you to create posts in plain text and have them display in semantically correct valid XHTML.
- Notifier: An email notification system which lets your readers subscribe to be notified whenever an individual post, a category, or even an entire weblog is updated. There's also a complete system for managing subscriptions.
SixApart (makers of Movable Type) announced the winners of their $20,000 plug-in contest the other week... (details here).
The grand prize winner was Jay Allen, author of the best MT plugin ever, MT-Blacklist (blog).
So, what exactly did Jay win? Glad you asked!
First Prize:
Your choice of a powerhouse desktop system worth more than $7,000. An Apple G5 dual 2GHz with 23" Apple Cinema HD Display or a Dell Dimension 3.2 GHz Extreme Edition with two 20.1" 2001FP Dell Ultra Sharp Digital Flat Panel Display and Adobe Creative Suite Premium with GoLive CS. Total approximate retail value: $8,200.
A comprehensive spam-blocking and management system for comments and trackbacks, complete with a management interface and remote importing of blacklist entries.
Second Prize (2)
Your choice of an Apple 17" PowerBook G4 or an IBM ThinkPad T41 worth $3,500 and Adobe Creative Suite Premium with GoLive CS. Total approximate retail value: $4,700.
KoalaRainbow is a visualization engine for Movable Type. It consists of a query language that allows users a good deal of freedom to construct the data they wish to visualize, and a procedural mechanism for visualizing that data. Features XPath-like query language supporting arbitrary queries with partial evaluation and constraint propagation of expressions to DB queries. Support for client-side image map generation.
XSearch/Plus is a complete system for plugging alternate search engines into your Movable Type install and includes a robust sample implementation of a Plucene-powered search engine.
Third Prize (3)
Apple iPod 40GB worth $499 and Adobe Creative Suite Premium with GoLive CS. Total approximate retail value: $1,699.
MultiBlog is a plugin that allows the user to include templated content from one blog in the template of another. It allows the user to define when a post to one blog should trigger a rebuild in another.
Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML). Thus, "Markdown" is two things: a plain text markup syntax, and a software tool, written in Perl, that converts the plain text markup to HTML. Markdown works both as a Movable Type plug-in and as a standalone Perl script -- which means it can also be used as a text filter in BBEdit (or any other application that supports filters written in Perl).
Notifier provides a subscription service to your users so that they can keep up on changes to your site without having to check back repeatedly. Notifier also has support for opt-out records, to allow users to indicate that they no longer wish to receive notifications. MT-Notifier automatically handles blog security, allowing logged-in users to see only the blogs to which they have access, and requiring a unique security code for each user to modify their subscriptions. And it allows the user to define access rules between blogs.
Plug In to Movable Type 3.0 Developer's Contest
Posted by: at July 29, 2004 12:28 AMGoggle Gropups might be usefull for it.
http://groups.google.com/
...........
Lowell Northcott
(sitedick)