Recently in Announcements Category

Podcasting support for Movable Type just got better. In this most recent release of the Podcasting plugin for Movable Type, iTunes support has been rounded making it easier than ever before to get your podcast listed and listed properly within the iTunes Music Store. This latest release adds the following features:

• a complete RSS feed that includes all of the proper iTunes meta data.
• an enhanced submission form that collects addition information about your podcast including its duration, whether it contains explicit material, a subtitle, summary, keywords and more.
• additional plugin options to capture important information about your blog so that its listing within iTunes can be finely tuned.
• support for basic authentication to access podcasts located behind a username and password.
• enhanced error messaging when linking to feeds.

This release is a necessary and important step to help make Movable Type the premiere self-hosted podcasting platform on the planet. I am excited by this release and am growing even more excited about the next one, which may include any number of the following features:

• download statistics for your podcasts
• iTunes notification pings
• auto-podcast submission to iTunes

But this plugin has been more the result of the feedback I have heard from folks like Bud Gibson, Todd Cochrane and others. So I anxiously await hearing from the Movable Type user community what they would like to see in the next version.

Following the request of a user I have updated the Promote This plugin for Movable Type, the plugin similar to the Socialize plugin for WordPress to include support for Technorati and Ma.gnolia. Thanks for the suggestion cognitive dissident!

About twice a month for the last year I have been getting requests to update my port of the Cutline theme to Movable Type 4.x. Today I am happy to announce that I have a first draft of the updated theme now available for MT4. Installing it is actually simple: there is nothing to download. Just copy and paste a URL into Movable Type and you are done. Seriously.

I have created a live demo of the theme for people to check out. I intend to publish there more information about the theme as well as any other information that may prove helpful to users. If you need help, please don't hesitate to leave a comment.

A while ago I switched from Apache to Lighttpd and in the process I broke my very own plugin installed locally here on majordojo: Clean Sweep. Clean Sweep is a plugin designed to help put an end to 404's on your blog that result in a lowered page rank, a poor reader experience, and poor performance overall.

In this latest release I have:

• fixed a few bugs.
• added support for Lighttpd making configuration as easy for this light weight web server as it is for Apache based web servers.

You may download the update from Clean Sweep's home page.

Last week I began the long overdue process of upgrading the Photo Gallery plugin to work with Movable Type 4.1. A week later I have made a number of improvements and have gotten the plugin to a point where I feel much more comfortable encouraging people to download, install and actually use it. I am using it now for my personal photo gallery - for what that is worth.

• Download the latest Photo Gallery 2.0

Change Log

• The upload dialog is now completely functional
• An upgrade function has been implemented to convert your old MT3.x galleries into Photo Gallery 2.0-compliant ones. The upgrade function right now is a URL hack, but it is simple: http://yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt.cgi?blogid=###&_mode=PhotoGallery.upgrade

Known Issues and To Do List

• The "Stop Design Photo Gallery (HTML)" template set is not yet functional.
• Tagging as a favorites doesn't work - I need to migrate old installs to use the @favorite tag as opposed to the Favorite Category.
• The template set should auto install some albums for you if none exist.
• Add a caption field for a photo
• Favorites do not display properly on the front door
• Upgrade comment form to use MT4's new form
• Paginate category archives by month somehow

In yesterday's hackathon I took another whack at Media Manager 2.0 adding support for two of the web's most popular media sharing services, Flickr and YouTube.

I have yet to update the documentation for these new services, so here are a few things you should know.

1. YouTube support requires no special configuration. Yay YouTube! 2. Flickr support requires that you register for a Flickr API Key, that you will input into your System Preferences for the Flickr plugin. Once that has been setup, you need to go to your profile, select "Flickr Auh" and authorize your MT blog to access your Flickr account.

Flickr support still needs a lot of work - especially in the search area. But this is likely to get overhauled a great deal as Media Manager because more of a framework for supporting third party media integration with MT.

The download/build below is an early build for which I have done very little testing. If you are a brave soul I would really appreciate your help and feedback in downloading and testing it.

» Download Media Manager 2.0 Beta 2.