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Anil Dash has a post over on the MT site about their latest "cool toy" - Motion for Movable Type

Anil's post goes into quite a bit of detail about how 6Apart expect Motion to be developed and used.

It's currently beta software in the true sense ie. it can and probably will break stuff, so don't try "upgrading" an existing install of MT to use it - seriously! MT's product manager Chris Hall explained in an email last night:

... is a beta version of the next version of MT Pro,4.25*, which will include Motion. The Motion plugin required changes to core, so it is not compatible with 4.23 or earlier versions of MT. We are also not advising upgrades from prior versions to Motion at this time, as we've not tested those scenarios. (Of course, if you are really curious, you are welcome to try, but as always when upgrading, BACK UP YOUR DATABASE FIRST.)

He added in a further email:

This release bundles the new Facebook Connect Commenters plugin,which we are releasing separately for MT 4.23 tomorrow. This plugin allows users to sign in with their Facebook account to comment on MT blogs, and also gives them the option of publishing their comment to their Facebook news feed, which can help give your blog visibility to the Facebook community, if that's something you desire. The Motion releases also adds many additional OpenID commenting options to MT, including AOL, Yahoo!, Google and WordPress.com.

I've setup a test install here (likely to be broken and reinstalled quite a bit)

The install is similar to the normal MT install process, so nothing new there.

Action Streams are fully incorporated and, while some services could be improved on, work pretty much "out of the tin". On a related note - if you're trying to setup Flickr in MT you may find this site useful.

For the first time since they introduced it I've been able to get my profile picture to work properly - small victories can be so rewarding!

The post edit screen now includes some really nice and easy links to help you post multimedia content:
Adding an image isn't that hard in the current interface, for example, but the new functions really come into their own when you want to incorporate multimedia - such as YouTube.

Of course the real fun stuff with Motion is the ability to combine profiles and actions from other existing services both in your published content and also in terms of allowing users to authenticate easily against your install.

Admittedly I haven't had a chance to really put Motion through its paces, but it will be very interesting to see how it develops over the coming weeks and months

Related articles by Zemanta

• Movable Type Motion: Installable Multimedia Microblogging
• If You Can't Beat 'Em, Join 'Em. Movable Type's Motion is Microblogging In a Box
• Six Apart Announces Motion: Roll Your Own Social Network with Movable Type
• Movable Type Pro and 4.2: Where Blogging is Headed (Anil Dash/Movable Type)
• Sixapart Revamps Movable Type Again - Simplifying Licenses At Last!
• Movable Type Monday Exclusive: Interview with Anil Dash on Six Apart Services and Media divisions

Seemingly October is THE month that SixApart use to launch products and services.

This October Movable Type celebrates 7 years of existence, Typepad has its fifth birthday and Vox is two.

You can read stories submitted by users of all three platforms on the respective pages (linked to above)

I have to admit that the birthday balloons for Movable Type are a bit cheesy, but I still like them!

Mark Carey from MT Hacks has released yet another useful plugin - the SelectiveCloner under a GPL license.

SelectiveCloner bridges a gap left by the "Cloner" plugin that ships with MT, as SelectiveCloner allows you to make a carbon copy of a blog's settings, templates and permissions WITHOUT content. If you want to rollout multiple blogs with the same look and feel Carey's latest release should save you quite a bit of time.

More information on his site.

While the new licensing model for Movable Type is a LOT easier to understand it's not without it's complications.

On the download page there is a basic license overview, but it still leads to confusion!

There are now 4 versions and 3 products, which seem to be as follows:

• Movable Type - license now open source and suited to "hackers" and developers who want to get "down and dirty" with the code.
• Movable Type Pro, which has two licenses
  
• Blogger - covers just about anyone that is not an incorporated company (ltd, llc etc.,)
• Business - any incorporated business entity
• Movable Type Enterprise - for big business. Its main "upsell" would appear to be support for database engines such as Oracle and MS SQL server. Obviously the Enterprise version also comes with support options and fees.

Byrne Reese, the MT product manager, has posted an explanation of the differences between "business" and "blogger" use over on the MT forums

So, in essence, you can opt for MT Pro even if you are making a fortune from affiliate advertising etc., as long as you aren't an incorporated entity.

That's pretty cool, as some of the community solution parts of the MT platform really negate the need for any other backend when building out a community site.

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• Movable Type Warm and Fuzzies
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• Six Apart Provides Social Networking Capabilities with Movable Type Pro
• Sixapart Revamps Movable Type Again - Simplifying Licenses At Last!
• Movable Type 4.2 Is one of the 'most significant and important releases in Movable Type's history'

Zemanta have recently announced support for MovableType 4.

Zemanta is a plugin for Firefox and Flock that helps you find links, tags, pictures and other content to help you with your blog articles.

I've been playing around with it for the last couple of days and have been very pleased with the results.

You'll notice the image on the right (Firefox usage stats over time) has been pulled in from a 3rd party site and the attribution added. All with a single click and no messing about.

The user interface is quite simple and intuitive and you can easily check an image's license without any hassle.

Related articles

• New release: Movable type and Flock support [via Zemanta]

About a year and a half ago I wrote about a trend I'd noticed where the space between "blogs" and "forums" was diminishing.

The convergence of the two media (mediums?) was becoming more and more apparent as software developers leveraged technologies in blogs to use in forums and other social media software and vice versa.

Connecting a blog site (CMS) with a forum isn't a particularly novel idea.
In many cases it's simply a matter of hacking the user data together to form a "bridge" of some kind so that a "user" or "login" can work in both places. However integrating the two tightly is not something you see every day and definitely not something you'd expect from an "off the shelf" solution.

The advent of Movable Type 4 has meant that innovative and creative developers have been able to get "down and dirty" and come up with some truly elegant hacks and extensions to the core software.

Mark Carey, who I've mentioned here more than once in the past, has just released his MT Forum plugin.

You don't need to be a genius to guess what it does. However what makes his implementation so interesting is the level of integration. It's not simply a matter of hooking a vBulletin install up with a Movable Type system - the forum is actually part of Movable Type once the plugin is live.

Now that is cool!

You can read more about the plugin on his site and take it for a test drive

Byrne has revamped the Movable Type community aggregator and relaunched it as Planet Movable Type

At present it's pulling in content from over a dozen feeds that cover various aspects of MT development, design and usage.

It's a handy resource

Some of the people in the MT community come up with some really fantastic ideas.

Aaron Bailey has just launched a new project to showcase "beautiful and interesting sites powered by MT"- Movable Love

Mark Carey has released a very interesting plugin for MovableType that emulates the Wordpress interface for authors.

Screenshots and demo are available on his site.

I only played with the demo for a couple of minutes and was amazed at how well it worked!

Nice work!

If you like working offline instead of using a web interface to edit and prepare articles, then there are number of solutions open to you.

Since I've recently come into possession of a MacBook Pro I decided to try out Ecto, which is one of the more popular solutions for Mac OS X (there are other versions available including Windows).

Ecto offers a free trial version, so I grabbed a copy to give it a go.

I get the impression that the software may not have been updated since the release of Movable Type 4, as some of the dialogue windows are slightly misleading.

Before you can make use of ecto you will need to access your services password.

Login to Movable Type and go to your user profile. You should see an option "web services password" which will be hashed. Just click on the "reveal password" link and your password will be shown in a popup window (unfortunately it's not HTML, so you can't copy and paste from it easily).

You then need to setup the account in ecto. Luckily that's very easy. It's so easy that even I managed to get setup within seconds! The only thing you need to change is the username / password pair. Instead of using your "normal" web password you will need to use the web services password, which I already mentioned. Once you've done that you will be up and running and the software will be able to retrieve all the necessary information about your various blogs.

Why use Ecto?

Why not is the easiest answer! Having said that it does offer a number of nice little features that make it an interesting and useful bit of software, such as its tight integration with other Mac OSX applications, such as iPhoto and iTunes. You can also easily add links to items on Amazon and tag them with your affiliate ID, which is pretty handy.

Being able to count the number of words, paragraphs etc., as you type is also an added bonus, as I'm always interested in knowing those kind of things.

Inserting links is a small bit awkward, as there isn't a button on the standard editing window, however when you do access the linking tool you also get more advanced options, so you can add a "title" tag.

All in all it is a nice little tool, though I'm not 100% sure if I'll buy a license - though I am tempted.

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