Movable Type 3.2

The new version of Movable Type sounds very nice, and they’re doing a good job telling its story through a series of entries. I recommend people read what they’re adding and if anything particularly strikes your fancy let us know so we can consider it for WordPress. Inspiration for WordPress has always come from many places, from 37signals or Adaptive Path to other weblogging platforms or content management systems.

29 thoughts on “Movable Type 3.2

  1. “Improved Documentation”

    Sorry, that was a cheap shot. I know the documentation for WordPress is a work of the community, and I know that the codex has come a looong way since it was first started. That said, the biggest hurdle moving from Movable Type to WordPress was the documentation.

    I want to make it clear that I did not mean this as a troll, it was merely the first thing that came to mind when reading the Movable Type page, especially considering my own experiences.

    On a more serious note, the global search seems nice. I have a search mentality, and although I attempt to structure things, I almost always end up using some kind of search to find what I’m looking for. A search allowing me to search through templates and plugins (especially with plugins that are larger than one file), as well as pages and posts on a number of attributes (meta data for example) would be God sent.

  2. I’ll throw out some:

    – multiple blogs from 1 install
    – better search (ability for plugins to seed data, search selective fields (title’s, by date, etc)
    – Ability to truly integrate gallery2 and coppermine to work in place of the upload feature, so you can manage your photo’s or other media (even mp3’s for podcasting) through these robust apps. Upload, then select the image, and it appears in your post, linking to the gallery.
    – use AsySound for podcasts, so when a user browses to a post that’s a podcast, they can listen via a flash applet (how spiffy)
    – better UI. Current UI is a bit bland, and old looking. Especially compared to the fancy new stuff around. Could use a new theme.
    – built in backup abilities, including automatically generating archives to a directory
    – logging! A great feature in MT was the unified log. And an api so plugins can dump to that log. To improve upon what they had, perhaps using ajax so you can dynamically sort by type of message, date, etc. etc.
    – static caching! (perhaps integrate wp-cache)

    I can always come up with more 😉

  3. Jonas,
    Well, now that you are a member of the WP community, would you consider using your experience on moving from MT to WP as a basis for writing some documentation for the Codex? It’s likely to be a better and more comprehensive bit of documentation coming from someone who actually went through the process rather than someone who has always been on WP or came from another platform.

  4. I’ll gladly throw some too; the numbers are the related item on the MT list:
    3. The junk folder already exists — the moderation queue — but it would be rather nice to be able not to receive e-mail notification of what goes in there (little “off-topic” example: GMail Notifier only counts new messages on the Inbox, not the Spam folder)
    9. As is: trusted commenters. 😉

  5. Another one (not very related, maybe, but just remembered):
    Options > Reading
    Syndication Feeds
    For each article, show:
    ( ) Full text
    ( ) Full text until <!–more–> (or a better designation, like “Teaser only”)
    ( ) Summary (by the way, it is a little inconsistent to have this called “Summary” when in the posting windows and the tags it is refered as “excerpt”..)

  6. Docs…..

    If every person who said that wrote just one page – hell even a decent paragraph – then we would have had more docs by now.
    But then if WP charged we’d have better too as the project could pay people.

    There is lots still to do – please consider helping.

  7. 1) More Docs, getting a lot better than the old Wiki but still some things need to be addressed.

    2) Search, I know its a big task but it’s pretty rubbish.

  8. Ok, just been reading that list. I like the idea of trusted commenters, you just drop a bunch of email addresses from your personal address book and they can leave comments without you needing to worry about moderating them.

  9. Searching posts & comments should be priority.

    what good is housing endless amounts of data when you cannot search through half of it, right?

    love my wordpress! Thank you everyone!

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  11. Email notification of a new post for blog readers. I know there is a plugin or two that does this, but Blogger apparently lets you put in one email address, which could be that of a group. Then the group software is responsible for subscriptions, removals, etc. Google Adwords is doing this very thing.

    I would think it could be done with pings, if someone had a service like Bloglet, but that reacted to pings instead of getting your RSS. (Push vs. Pull.)

  12. Search and replace with wildcard strings

    Trusted commenters list (not with typekey please), just an email list as stated above.

    In my opinion Tiger admin is the best thing to happen to wordpress since the 1.5 upgrade and while it’s not to everyone’s taste, the one part of wordpress that felt lacking (before it) was the admin area. There are many good design ideas in Tiger admin that you ought to consider making standard, or, bundle a few admin themes with the initial download.

  13. João, Tom, and Richard:

    We already have “trusted commenters” and we’ve had it since the original release of 1.5. Sounds like we may need a new interface though for adding email addresses to it when we feel the need rather than waiting for that person to comment. Honestly though, for me personally, that belongs in a plugin. I’d rather approve someone the first time they comment rather than have a list of 200 people’s email addresses in my database that may never comment on my site. Just my $0.02 though.

  14. I would actually like to see a feature in WP that allows you to preview your theme before you implement it on your blog….something like how Blogger has you preview. I’m not great at using CSS and so on but I know a little and it helps to have that feature, for me at least. I would love to develop some plugins for WordPress I’ve been tinkering with a few ideas so hopefully I will get my first one out in the next few months.

  15. Mmmm since I switched to WP from MT I’ve gotten more and more infatuated with WP each day, but there are two things I really miss from my old MT days:

    – Managing multiple blogs from 1 install
    – The MTOtherBlog plug in. If I’m running 2 or more blogs from the same database there should be a fast and easy way to show entries from one blog to another, I used to do that when my photolog and blog were both running from the same MT database and I haven’t been able to find a nice way to that in WP…

    Just that, 2 cents from an Argentinian MT user who switched to WP for good 🙂

  16. is there a central spot where we could list new features we would like to see? Such as the Codex or is your blog/this post the only place for now?

    if it is here, for now I would like to (also) see
    – Managing multiple blogs from 1 install
    – search & replace
    – option for static page publishing

  17. “Email notification of a new post for blog readers.”
    Don’t you think that spam supplies enough trash e-mail traffic?… :/ There are quite enough clients to read feeds, inclusively some e-mail clients (e.g., Thunderbird) and browsers (Firefox, soon IE 7) do it. The inverse tendency (turning some popular mail notifications into feeds, like bulletin board topic reply notifications — bbPress already approaches it, and I have myself implemented a similar system on a phpBB install) would be more interesting and would bring more benefits overall (IMHO, of course).

    @Wantmoore:
    as far as I knew, WordPress only had “untrusted commenters”, not “trusted commenters”.
    Aren’t you refering to “Comment author must have a previously approved comment” as a trusting system? It’s just that t isn’t; even after approving one’s first comment, it will be possibly held for moderation if it contains suspicious words…
    If there’s _really_ a trusting system, well.. I surely am not th only one to be glad to know more about it. 😉

  18. Ben, no that isn’t what “pages” are. Publishing static pages refers to the actual generation of real HTML files within directories on your server, as opposed to merely using database queries to generate them “on the fly” each time they are viewed, as WordPress does.

    Someone like myself, who has way too much server space to play around with, I’m all for a static page option in WordPress.

  19. A user rights and levels system that normal human beings can understand. Level 1 to 10? What’s that? There’s not even a link to a help file in the interface to explain it. I’ve helped many WP users who struggled with this because they had no clue what to do.

    A brighter, more cheerful interface with key errors properly highlighted (“If this file was writable, you could edit it” in italics text doesn’t suffice.)

    I’ll try to put all my ideas down together at one place and post them some time.

  20. Multiblog support, with MT-like control of author permissions across them. It’s the one thing stopping me moving over from MT to WordPress.

    Also, documentation as to how to get The Loop to render the first entry on a page differently from the rest would be useful. I’ve tried and tried to work it out, and couldn’t – and nobody on the Support forums could help either.

  21. Multiple blogs from one install!

    The earliest threads I have found in the WP forums promising this feature date all the way back to 2002 and we still don’t have it.

    I need to have 2 or 3 separate blogs (blog, vlog, photoblog) all integrated on the main page of my site while still housed in their respective subdirectories as individual blogs. I hate MT and it’s antiquated Perl basis, but it’s looking like I have to use it. 🙁

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