Information on what’s new in MT 3.3, which is next week going into beta. A lot of stuff focused on simplifying administration, lots of RSS feed and tagging bits. More robust/expanded template stuff. Backwards compatability with existing plug-ins (huzzah).
Smarter Defaults, and Fewer Settings
Setting up a new blog or a new installation can be like getting a new computer — the first thing you do is turn off all the stupid settings. So by default, we’ve got rid of fifty settings and controls when you create a new blog in Movable Type 3.3, and made the default choices be smarter about doing what you expect. You can still get to these options (and dozens of new ones, for people that like to tweak) but the good news is now that you don’t have to if you don’t want to.
I suppose that’s good. I’m not all that fond of all the MT defaults all the time, so making it more simplistic in presentation may not be the right direction. But, then, I learn new programs by starting with the Tools/Options menu …
A Better Author Experience
(a) Built in Tags, with support for automatically publishing tag clouds and support for the rel=”tag” attribute. (b) Resizable posting text areas that remember your settings and have bigger, more readable fonts. … (c) And an improved junk management system means you spend even less time dealing with spam.
(Letters mine). The (a) stuff, meh. Tagging is, to my mind, sloppy and overrated, but I’ll at least take a look at it. The (b) stuff sounds intriguing, though, frankly, with the various 3rd-party clients out there for authoring (SharpMT and Ecto, to name but too), I can’t get too excited. I look forward to more details on (c).
Better Discoverability
A vastly improved search now offers per-blog templates for search results. This also combines with the new tagging feature to offer tag search across blogs, per-tag feeds, or even per-keyword feeds for search results. And search result feeds are OpenSearch compatible. If you’re picky about URLs or trying to optimize for search engines, you can easily choose from a range of URL schemes, or create your own without editing templates. Each of your blogs’ categories can have its own custom publishing path as well.
Some nice bits here. Improving the templating for the search engine is an overdue feature. And being able to publish a given category to its own location is *really* nice — it’s almost a way to get around the blog-count/author-count restrictions in MT’s licensing.
Manage Your Blogs With a Single Feed
All activity on your blogs is now available in an Activity Feed, customized for every user in the system. Instead of getting emails about your blog, choose whether your Activity Feed includes information about comments, TrackBacks, entries, or any combination. The Activity Feed can also display information about your Movable Type installation, such as errors or warnings, and provides links right in the feed for any action you want to perform. Instead of having to remember which screen has the feature you’re looking for, the Activity Feed delivers action links right to you, and plugins can add even more information to the feed, such as reporting or custom updates.
Hmm. RSS as a notification tool. Clever. I look forward to playing with this.
Smarter Bundled Plugins
Widget Manager: A powerful new plugin (based on the popular Sidebar Manager) lets you rearrange and redesign elements on your blog without editing any HTML. And other plugins can make their own new widgets, simplifying design tasks. An improved StyleCatcher gives you access to all the designs from The Style Contest (http://thestylecontest.com), letting you change the look of your blog without you having to touch the XHTML or CSS. (Major thanks to Elise, Arvind and Jesse for their incredible, hard work on the Style Contest!)
I’m a little leery of this stuff — I like being able to tweak appearances, so canned widgets and automagical style systems don’t appeal to me (plus the problems I’ve run into with the existing StyleCatcher system in MT doesn’t fill me with confidence).
Lots of other promises of Good Stuff and Good Surprises during beta. Frankly, I’d settle for their getting the SplashBlog stuff integrated to MT …
UPDATE: Actually, this article as from the end of May, so the Beta should already be on.