May 2011 Archives

How to Show a List of all Possible Values in a Custom Field in Movable Type

By Maarten Schenk on May 31, 2011 11:27 AM | 2 Comments | No TrackBacks |
User birdahonk on the Movable Type forums was looking for a way to display a list of the countries in which the pictures on his photoblog were taken.  The country of each photo was stored in a custom field, and he would like to have a simple list of them, without duplicates.  Some Movable Type template magic to the rescue!
Continue reading How to Show a List of all Possible Values in a Custom Field in Movable Type.

PBS.org Hacked, or Why It Is Important to Keep Movable Type Updated

By Maarten Schenk on May 31, 2011 10:43 AM | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks |
Hacker group LulzSec announced they hacked and defaced PBS.org, and claimed:
PBS.org was owned via a 0day we discovered in mt4 aka MoveableType 4
This comes just days after Six Apart announced a security upgrade for all Movable Type versions.  The most likely scenario is that someone reverse-engineered the security fixes to discover which vulnerabilies were patched and then exploited them.
Continue reading PBS.org Hacked, or Why It Is Important to Keep Movable Type Updated.

Displaying the Latest from the Blogs that Most Recently Published an Entry with Movable Type

By Maarten Schenk on May 30, 2011 9:37 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks |
Using Movable Type's Multiblog feature it is relatively easy to aggregate the most recent blog posts accross your entire Movable Type installation. For example, <mt:entries include_blogs="all">...</mt:entries> will get you the ten most recent entries. But sometimes this is not what you need.  What if you want to make sure there is at least one entry from each blog being displayed? 
Continue reading Displaying the Latest from the Blogs that Most Recently Published an Entry with Movable Type.

Displaying the Date and Time of the Latest Activity on a Movable Type Blog

By Maarten Schenk on May 27, 2011 9:38 AM | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks |
I recently needed to show the date and time of the last activity on a blog: in other words, when was the last entry or comment posted?  For this to work, you need to know when the last entry was posted, when the last comment was posted and which happened last.  Here is the template code I came up with:
Continue reading Displaying the Date and Time of the Latest Activity on a Movable Type Blog.

Movable Type and Melody Community Aggregator (re-)Launched!

By Maarten Schenk on May 25, 2011 11:14 AM | 1 Comment | No TrackBacks |
A few weeks ago I already announced I was working on a new version of the old and defunct Movable Type Community Aggregator (it can still be found here).  I am pleased to say that I'm launching it today, on the same day Movable Type 5.1 came out.  Without further ado, here is the new Movable Type and Melody Community Aggregator.
Continue reading Movable Type and Melody Community Aggregator (re-)Launched!.

Movable Type 5.1 is Released!

By Maarten Schenk on May 25, 2011 10:57 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks |
After four release candidates, Movable Type 5.1 is finally here.  A list of new features can be found here, and the release notes are here.   There is also a quite impressive list of community contributions in the release notes, as opposed to those of earlier versions.  That sounds like good news for the vitality of the MT community!  Anyway, I'm off to go install 5.1!

Movable Type 5.1 Release Candidate 4 is out

By Maarten Schenk on May 20, 2011 8:01 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks |
Another day, another release candidate of Movable Type 5.1...  Seems like they squashed one more issue for this one.  Anyway, if you want to try it out without installing anything, Mihai has made it available on-line for testing.

Movable Type 5.1 RC3 Released

By Maarten Schenk on May 18, 2011 10:27 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks |
Apparently there were some more bugs to fix before the final release, because a third release candidate for MT 5.1 has been announced by Six Apart, with a fourth on the horizon.  As always, there are release notes, you can see them here.

Stopping Movable Type Comment Spam with Comment Challenge

By Maarten Schenk on May 16, 2011 2:26 PM | 10 Comments | No TrackBacks |
The built-in TypePad Antispam plugin has been stopping 99% of all spam on this blog for a while now, but I have the impression the total amount has been going up and up, making the remaining 1% all the more annoying.  That is why I recently installed a relatively old (but compatible with MT 5) plugin from Jay Allen: Comment Challenge.
Continue reading Stopping Movable Type Comment Spam with Comment Challenge.
« April 2011 | Main Index | Archives | June 2011 »