dennis.ca

Movable Type 3.2 has been released, and it appears to have been worth the wait. There are lots of improvements covering the gamut including functionality, usability, appearance, and performance. A particularly welcome inclusion is the great accompanying documentation, which improves with every release.

Anil's Flash upgrade demo doesn't exagerrate about how wonderfully easy the upgrade process is -- it literally took longer for me to copy the files to the server than perform the actual upgrade. Kudos to everyone at Six Apart, and especially to the testers (and beta testers). My environment isn't very exotic (Linux, MySQL) compared to some, but isn't it nice when you encounter something that works as advertised?

After playing with the software for a couple of hours, I have a few nitpicky things I'd personally like to see in subsequent releases:

This is probably relatively rare, but I would like to see the ability to have multiple archive mappings for a given archive type.

My particular reason is that I've got years worth of archived entries that are indexed by search engines. I'd like to have a crossover period where both sets of archive filenames can be indexed before eliminating the 'old style' filenames rather than going through the horrendous task of configuring web server rewrite options.

Some people are probably turning their noses at that idea, but who really wants to trudge through a manual mapping of hundreds of entries? Not me!

Next up is consistency for the radio buttons used in 'Display Options' popups. I personally like the vertical layouts. Depending on where you invoke the popup, some appear as vertical lists while others appear as horizontal lists. It would be nice if they were all the same (or individually configurable somewhere).

Filtering while editing entries is greatly enhanced by an expanded set of criteria, not to mention the long overdue search ability.

One thing that would dramatically enhance the power of filtering would be if it were possible to save customized search and/or filter presets. It would be ideal if these presets could be invoked from a drop-down list similar to the one provided for 'More actions...' This capability would also be welcome in Power-Editing mode.

Finally, a small complaint about Trackback entry functionality. I've not tried this in Internet Explorer, but in Firefox 1.0.6 for Windows, the display gets fishy when attempting to assign multiple categories to a new Trackback entry.

When 'Assign Multiple Categories' is clicked, a scrollable checklist is opened. Unfortunately, the dimensions of the control obscure all sorts of other items including the 'Assign Multiple Categories', 'Allow Comments', 'Allow Trackbacks', and 'Text Formatting' fields. Clicking outside of the control closes it, but it isn't immediately obvious that the problem is recoverable.

...Like I said, all nitpicky issues! Congratulations again to Six Apart and of course to Jay Allen, to whom I still owe a debt of gratitude.