Six Apart launched the final release of Movable Type 3.2 yesterday. As anyone who glanced at my footer could tell, I have been playing with the last three beta versions of 3.2. The upgrades have been painless as usual.
Don’t let the incremental version number fool you. I’m thinking this upgrade may be as huge as the move from 2.6 to 3.0 was. The polished admin interface is the most obvious change. To take advantage of many of the most powerful new features, though, I will have to spend some time tweaking my templates.
As part of their launch celebration they are offering a $30 discount off of their licenses. Free licenses are still available, but the paid licenses have a few additional perks. Also, opening my wallet was the best way that I could think of to say, “Damn fine piece of software.”
And they’ve finally got a decent User Manual. Actually, it’s more than decent, it’s a showcase of how a blog-engine can be a powerful way to generate online documentation.
I thought this was pretty cool—in addition to a library of thirty-three default styles, they’ve got this brilliant AJAX-powered Style Generator. Even if you’re not an MT user, try it out; it’s kind of fun.
Not related to the new version, but still bloody brilliant (okay, this is the last of the gushing)—Douglas Bowman of Stopdesign created an amazing photo gallery powered by MT (and iPhoto), and he released the templates and documentation to the world. Wow.
Now if I can just convince the Movable Type server administrator at my university to upgrade to 3.2, so I can use this version at work too.
Let us know if you need help persuading your administrator! We’ve got lots of better features for admins, so that might help.
Unfortunately, Anil, the exciting new features of MT 3.2 are of minor importance to the administrative unit who have been now placed in charge of our central blog server. They seem to have adopted a dismissive attitude about blogging. Contrary to anything remotely rational, the major competitor to MT at Princeton is not WordPress, but the Journal LX plug-in for Blackboard.
I promise to write about this in more detail in the future, possibly in a personal message; unfortunately, the politics are messy.
Thanks, Steve. I’ve been neglecting it a bit lately, though.
(Update: I deleted the comments by “Steve.” He turned out to be a persistent spammer, who keeps submitting comments with disingenuous props and links to legitimate sites, in the hopes of poisoning the spam filters.)