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Upgraded to MT 3.2!

Today I spent a couple of minutes (yeah, minutes!) to upgrade my personal blog (in Japanese) to MT 3.2, from MT 2.51 with Japanese patch. It was pretty straightforward, except I had to take a dump of mysql and converted it into utf-8 from euc-jp, which I thought makes a trouble somehow.

The automatic upgrade process is pretty slick and did a nice job to upgrade everything without any problem. All I had to do was manually copying the necessary plugin (most of all are unnecessary now thanks to default SpamLookup plugin) and modifying the hardcoded charset strings in templates.

Kudos and Thanks to the MT team!

MT 3.2 launched!

MT 3.2 is launched! Congrats to the team (Jay, Ezra, Brad, Anil, Walt, Nick and others) for the pretty slick and the best release of Movable Type ever. I'll spend some time in this weekend to upgrade mine to 3.2.

Well, I assume that you're wondering why I have to spend some time for upgrading since in most cases upgrade to 3.2 is just so easy, however my MT installation is based on MT 2.51 (!) with my local patches. It also uses MySQL 3.x with euc-jp character set. I have to talk also with SAKK MT localization team what's the best way to do that.

I'm pretty excited and can't wait for the day I can use 3.2. I guess 99% of my local patches to the code (like killing trackback/comment spams from Main menu, DSBL lookup, banning ASCII-only comments, programmable JavaScript interface for Google AdSense Alt ads) can be easily done with the new plugin architecture.

(The picture was taken by Yann from EMEA)

Movable Type 3.2 Beta is now available

Link: Movable Type 3.2 Beta.

Get in on the ground floor of the massive update to the leader in weblog publishing software.

MT 3.2 open beta is now available. Go get it if you haven't yet, and witness the sweet updates on the user interface and very useful functionalities discussed on 32 lovely features for 3.2. Kudos to the team for hitting this milestone!

Movable Type 3.16 release

Link: Movable Type - News - Movable Type 3.16 released.

The Movable Type team has been hard at work and we have some very exciting things coming in the 2005 release schedule. To kick things off we are proud to introduce Movable Type 3.16.

Movable Type's newest version 3.16, with not so many eye-catching new features, but with great quality and stability is now released. Kudos to the MT team. Links: Jay, Mena, Ginevra.

Movable Type Ajax-ed Search

Link: antipop2.0 - Movable Type な Blog の全エントリを JavaScript with XMLHttpRequest でインクリメンタル検索する.

Here's an awesome sample to search Movable Type entries using Ajax technology. The search itself is not done asynchronously using xmlHttpRequest, but on manipulating Javascript array (entries list is generated by MT template system and loaded using xmlHttpRequst on the startup). So you know it's not pure "A"jax, but cool and useful enough to note here.

Banning ASCII or Latin-1 comments

Link: Movable Type Plugin Directory: BanASCII.

Deny or moderate ASCII or Latin-1 comments using CommentFilter API

I've converted my "Ban ASCII or Latin-1 comment" workaround (which was an MT2 source hack) into MT3 callback plugin. It'll reduce comment SPAMs in Japanese Blogs effectively, as most of the Japanese Bloggers want to discuss their readers with Japanese. It supports moderation instead of denying, thanks to easy-to-use CommentFilter API.

There could be the opposite way: to ban Asian comments in Latin/Euro/US blogs, which'll be an interesting homework for readers.

Movable Type Workflow plugin

Link: David Raynes: Workflow 0.5.

Workflow is a plugin for Movable Type 3.1 which lets an author pass ownership of an entry to any other author in Movable Type with appropriate permissions.

Workflow is a MT plugin to allow transfer of edit permission to other users. This is what default installation of MT lacks. This plugin will be especially useful when used in business blog.

MTKeywords plugin

Link: richard's ramblings...: MTKeywords.

MTKeywords is a Movable Type plugin that compiles a list of fairly relevant keywords from the aggregate of the body of an entry, its title, and its comments. While the default purpose of the entry's Keywords field is to populate the page's Keywords meta tag, I found that extra data entry field to be most advantageously used for other purposes. Plus, there hasn't been a way to auto-generate a list of relevant keywords. Thus, MTKeywords was born!

MTKeywords is a Movable Type plugin that extracts keywords automatically using bigram algorithm.