Ben and Mena are at center stage now, announcing the new Movable Type 3.1 product. It’s scheduled to go into beta soon, and should be released next month. Ben said last night at the developer’s dinner that it would be August 31 (cute again), but that date hasn’t been mentioned again.
The first announcement is for post scheduling. You can create a post, then set it to be posted in the future. Once you do, the post will be automatically posted (presumably, the appropriate templates will be rebuilt) on the date and time you specify.
The next announcement is the addition of subcategories to the core MT code. David Raynes has been working with the folks at Six Apart to integrate his subcategories plugin with the base software, and this will be available with the release of version 3.1.
The most exciting of the features is undoubtedly the addition of dynamic templates to the system. The lack of dynamic building has long been a complaint about MT. Now, Brad Choate has been working with Six Apart, and MT 3.1 will introduce a simple method to create dynamic templates.
Using this feature, you can make certain templates – say, older archives – be served dynamically, meaning you don’t have to rebuild your entire site when you change the format of those archives. Meanwhile, you can keep other templates – say, your index files and RSS feeds – static, so that they don’t overwhelm the load on your server when Slashdot links to your site.
PHP will be required on the server, but you don’t need to know it in order to use this feature. Just check a box on the template and pages created with that template will then be served dynamically. Cool.
Additionally, the plugins submitted for the contest (both the winning plugins and some others) will be added to a ‘plugin pack’, which will make adding popular features to your installation much easier than it has been in the past. Presumably, more details on this last feature will be coming in the future.
The dynamic template system alone is already making me salivate about the new release. As I mentioned previously, it’s been a hard road in the last few months, but I’ll be the first to say that I’m glad that I stuck with MT (and 6A) through it, and I’m very much looking forward to the new functionality.
Comments
6 responses to “Movable Type v3.1 Announcement”
I have zero solid information to back this up (I haven’t even looked at the code), but I’d suspect there are no limits to the number of layers you can create, because the system is based off of David Raynes’ SubCategories plugin, and there was no limitation to the number of layers to that system.
Anyone know how the subcategories works exactly, how many layers, etc? This is a must for my blog so I’m excited but am eager for more info!
WordPress can have a infinite number of templates, but so far it doesn’t have a spiffy way to manage them as movabletype does.
Looking forward to having proper subcategories – that sounds really great! August 31st is already to far… I hope there is a public beta beforehand.
I have no idea about the capabilities of WordPress. I don’t use it. Feel free to leave more information if you’d like!
Doesn’t WordPress already have all of this?
To my understanding based on the demo, the only change is a checkbox in the template itself that says to rebuild dynamically. The different templates, as well as the different template names, will stay the same.