Since yesterday afternoon this blog has been running on the cutting edge version of Movable Type: 4.2 Pro. In fact, it's been running on beta versions of it for the last couple of months. The major pre-advertised change was speed, and that's been more than delivered on. The whole application is significantly more snappy than 4.1 was. I can't wait to get it live on our work servers.
However, there was an ever bigger change: the Community Pack, which used to be a chargeable upgrade to the product - and quite a pricey one at that - is bundled into the product:
Movable Type Pro for Social Networks from http://anil.vox.com/
Essentially, it adds social network type functionality to the platform - the ability of commenters to create profiles, follow other members on the blog platform, and rate content.
However, there was an ever bigger change: the Community Pack, which used to be a chargeable upgrade to the product - and quite a pricey one at that - is bundled into the product:
Movable Type Pro for Social Networks from http://anil.vox.com/
Essentially, it adds social network type functionality to the platform - the ability of commenters to create profiles, follow other members on the blog platform, and rate content.
However, it feels like there's still a significant amount of work for
the team to do to make implementing this stuff easier. I've had an
initial poke at adding the community stuff to this blog, using the instructions here,
and it's non trivial. For a start, the profile page is a central
template, meaning the same template is used for all blogs in the MT
install - that's going to be quite a design challenge, as we'll have
over 100 blogs using that template. And, in its default form, it relies
on the default stylesheets to look good. Here's how it looks on my blog
right now:
I can either redesign the template to make it work well with my
stylesheet, or I can redesign it so it isn't dependent on the blog
style and use the default one. Neither of them are simple tasks and are
reasons that the hype will outpace the average blogger's ability to
integrate this stuff simply. A lot more work on the documentation would
help - or an alternative deafult profile template that adapts a lot
more easily to various different stylesheets.
Still, that doesn't mean I'm going to avoid doing it. We'll definatly be making use of this new functionality on our most active blogs in the months to come. It's just a pity it's not easier to use out of the box.
That said, now that the Community Pack is a core part of the non-Open Source version of MT, I'd expect to see significant improvements in its integration in future versions. In particualr, I'd love to see the Action Streams plugin intelligently implemented, so you could start following commenters and authors to their activity elsewhere. Let's see where Six Apart take it from here.
I can either redesign the template to make it work well with my
stylesheet, or I can redesign it so it isn't dependent on the blog
style and use the default one. Neither of them are simple tasks and are
reasons that the hype will outpace the average blogger's ability to
integrate this stuff simply. A lot more work on the documentation would
help - or an alternative deafult profile template that adapts a lot
more easily to various different stylesheets.Still, that doesn't mean I'm going to avoid doing it. We'll definatly be making use of this new functionality on our most active blogs in the months to come. It's just a pity it's not easier to use out of the box.
That said, now that the Community Pack is a core part of the non-Open Source version of MT, I'd expect to see significant improvements in its integration in future versions. In particualr, I'd love to see the Action Streams plugin intelligently implemented, so you could start following commenters and authors to their activity elsewhere. Let's see where Six Apart take it from here.
There is a great plugin called Community Template Override, not officially announced yet that allows you to specify a 'tmpl_id' parameter in your URLs to your profile template. When the parameter is specified you can instruct Movable Type to use a different template for rendering your profile. This for example can be used to have a different profile template used for each site in your MT install.
Is that helpful? :)
Oh, that sounds very useful indeed.
Once we get 4.2 Enterprise going on the work servers, I'll make sure that's in there, too.
Thanks, Byrne.