Results tagged “movable type”

Movable Type 5 is out now, and I'll be writing about it a little in a few days, but I won't be upgrading this site to it until a few key plugins have been updated, too. 

Back in 2003/2004 Movable Type was pretty much the predominant blogging platform for the self-hosters. And then two things broke its dominance in the market-place: a rather dumb pricing decision by Six Apart (which was rapidly corrected) and the growing wave of spam, which Six Apart was slow to get on top of. After all, there were a lot of MT blogs out there - it was worth the spammers targeting it. 

Fast forward 5 years, and WordPress has throughly usurped Movable Type's position as the leading self-hosted blogging platform. And lo, the weekend has been full of people tearing their hair out as their WordPress blogs were hacked seven ways to Sunday. Reading about people having to export, destroy and recreate their blogs was painful. Blogging is over a decade old. We should be better at this stuff by now.

But you could see it coming. It only takes a cursory search around the web to find blogs running on ancient platforms - a Movable Type 2.x here, a WordPress 1.x there.  And then the complaints started about the repeated waves of updates to the 2.8 version of the software. When people are complaining about updates, that means some people just aren't bothering to do it. And that means security vulnerabilities are staying wide open. The the odd savvy user like Suw got hacked. By Saturday, tech celebs from Robert Scoble to Andy Ihnatko got hacked. Twitter was full of the wails of the hacked, and the retweetings of the warning.

As I tweeted, WordPress has become Windows - so dominant that it's a huge target. And this is only going to get worse - access to millions of websites through attacking a single platform? That's just too tempting a target. 

The key new feature is Motion, and here's a video which explains it:

While doing that, I made a few other changes:

And talking of outside services, Facebook Connect is here! You can use your Facebook account to sign into this blog to comment by clicking "sign in to comment" and choosing the Facebook Connect option. It should both grab your userpic and push your comment into your profile on Facebook - but it's still a beta plugin, so we'll see...

I'm really happy for the guys over in Ireland about this, and am allowing myself a little glow of pride, as I was heavily involved in the initial setup of the site. It was the first magazine website we built using Movable Type, with the help of Lift.