Between 9 AM and 10 AM on Tuesday, November 1 (during fall recess), I plan to upgrade the Movable Type installation on the blog server to version 3.2.
The upgrade should be seamless; it should not result in any significant downtime. Visitors to your blog will probably not even notice any difference. However, the upgrade includes quite a few features that you will be able to tap into should you choose to.
- Improved documentation
Documentation for previous versions of Movable Type were a bit…lacking. The new documentation can be quite useful, especially for those who like to customize their templates. - Better spam management
For the past few months, content creators on this blog server who are using comments and TrackBacks have been plagued by comment and TrackBack spam. This spam takes the form of dozens of vile, disgusting links to even viler websites posted among the legitimate feedback from your readers. Our current defense against comment spam is the MT-Blacklist plug-in; however, the author of this plug-in has obsoleted it in favor of the SpamLookup plug-in that is built into MT 3.2. Most of the spam that now gets through should be then redirected to a Junk Comments folder, and the blog author can either promote that comment to be published, delete it immediately, or let that comment be automatically deleted after a set period of time. - Better spam management
This one is worth mentioning again. - An improved admin interface
Almost everything is more or less in the same place; it just looks nicer, more polished and somewhat more colorful. - Easier template styles
With the new template architecture in MT 3.2, you will be able to use any of the styles in Six Apart’s vastly expanded Style Library. Also, the css-phobic can use the browser-based Style Generator to create new styles. Finally, the new StyleCatcher plug-in will allow blog authors to apply a new style to a site with just a few clicks. - New plug-ins
Six Apart redesigned Movable Type’s plug-in architecture with 3.2, many of the plug-ins that I would like to add to this server only work with that version. A few planned plug-in installations include a couple more anti-spam options and, per a user’s request, a notification plug-in that allows readers to subscribe to a blog or a post in order to be automatically e-mailed about content changes.
You can read more about version 3.2 of Movable Type at Six Apart’s website.