Well, after several weeks of planning, I finally upgraded our blog server to Movable Type 4.2, Six Apart's latest and greatest MT blogging platform. Technically, it's Movable Type 4.2RC1 (release candidate 1) and still considered a beta, but close enough, I say. I was tired of waiting for MT 4.2 to launch. TMC was using MT 3.33 for the longest time and I really wanted many of the MT 4.0+ features including custom fields, asset management, performance improvements, and some better CMS management.
Everything in the upgrade went fairly smoothly. The biggest help were several MT-Hacks.com plugins developed by MT guru Mark Carey. My favorite of which is TemplateInheritance, a plugin that lets me configure one "master blog" with customized templates and then have all the other templates inherit their templates from this master blog. You can remove inheritance for specific templates, such as a blog roll template that each blogger wants to customize. Overall, this plugin saved me a ton of time. If you use Movable Type for multiple blogs, go buy this plugin and tell Mark I sent you his way.
Other useful plugins I installed include:
Pagination
TemplateExporter
TemplateInstaller
FastSearch
CacheBlock
VisitorStats
Media Manager
MT-Notifier
And a few other miscellaneous plugins. I'm going over to the Movable Type plugin repository now to check out some other cool plugins. I'm debating installing the FCKEditor plugin, which I did try in my pre-production tests. It works great, but the upload function replaces the built-in MT 4.2 asset management.
Maybe if I can hack the FCKEditor plugin to work with the asset management tool I'll install it.
Of course, the bloggers are used to FCKEditor on MT 3.33, so they're used to the feature-richness of this rich text editor, including smiley faces, spell check, and tons of customizable buttons. So if the bloggers revolt against the built-in MT 4.2 rich text editor I may have to install it.
Well, some odds and ends to clean up on the blogs, but let me know how you like it. Also, you'll noticed I added a widget that displays recent blog entries from "Around TMCnet Blogs". Hope you like the new look!
Everything in the upgrade went fairly smoothly. The biggest help were several MT-Hacks.com plugins developed by MT guru Mark Carey. My favorite of which is TemplateInheritance, a plugin that lets me configure one "master blog" with customized templates and then have all the other templates inherit their templates from this master blog. You can remove inheritance for specific templates, such as a blog roll template that each blogger wants to customize. Overall, this plugin saved me a ton of time. If you use Movable Type for multiple blogs, go buy this plugin and tell Mark I sent you his way.
Other useful plugins I installed include:
Pagination
TemplateExporter
TemplateInstaller
FastSearch
CacheBlock
VisitorStats
Media Manager
MT-Notifier
And a few other miscellaneous plugins. I'm going over to the Movable Type plugin repository now to check out some other cool plugins. I'm debating installing the FCKEditor plugin, which I did try in my pre-production tests. It works great, but the upload function replaces the built-in MT 4.2 asset management.
Maybe if I can hack the FCKEditor plugin to work with the asset management tool I'll install it.Of course, the bloggers are used to FCKEditor on MT 3.33, so they're used to the feature-richness of this rich text editor, including smiley faces, spell check, and tons of customizable buttons. So if the bloggers revolt against the built-in MT 4.2 rich text editor I may have to install it.
Well, some odds and ends to clean up on the blogs, but let me know how you like it. Also, you'll noticed I added a widget that displays recent blog entries from "Around TMCnet Blogs". Hope you like the new look!
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wow! I love the new look. Great layout. Also noticed the search function actually works!
It's working pretty good!