Movable Type 4.2 RC4 and some of our latest hacks

Byrne Reese - 23 July 2008 - 4 Comments

We have had some amazing feedback from the community since we started the public beta of Movable Type 4.2 - a release we consider to be one of the most important upgrades to Movable Type ever. Users of 4.2 can attest as well: Movable Type 4.2 is fast -- never before have we seen performance increases of 100x for common tasks like search. Of course, improvements like that are only possible, I believe, when a team of people come together to stop using band-aids and focus intently on actually solving a problem in a fundamental way.

Naturally with improvements like that in store for our users, the most common question we hear is, "when will Movable Type 4.2 be released?" With bug reports starting to wane and feedback slowing to a trickle, we think we are getting really close to a final release, and it is our belief that the latest, Release Candidate 4, will be the last release candidate prior to release.

In the meantime, for those of you aching for something new, something cool, or something useful, here are some things coming out of our weekly hackathons that you might be check out:

Template Set Exporter Tool

Designers should like this handy tool: "export-ts" is a command line tool that one can run to convert a blog's templates to a template set that can easily be zipped up and sent to a friend, client or to your web site for distribution.

» Download from code.sixapart.com

Mid-Century Template Set

The Mid-Century Template Set is the latest theme for Movable Type by Jim Ramsey, the lead designer for Movable Type and the same designer who brought you the Universal Template Set (soon to be renamed "Professional Website"). Mid-Century is a new template set that takes special advantage of some of Movable Type 4.2's features like comment threading. It is not done yet, but it is a good hint of some things to come.

» MidCenturyTS-0.9.zip (MT 4.2 required)

Forum Utils

We are still working on the name, but the idea behind this plugin is to provide editors and designers with more tools to help promote useful and insightful comments more prominently on your web site by allowing editors to feature comments and promote comments to full-fledged entries.

» Download a beta of Forum Utils

Fluid Plugin

Users who dug the post promoting the amazing work by Jesse to turn Movable Type into a desktop application on Mac OS X, will also like the hacks we are working on to enhance that experience: dock badges, growls and more are coming.