It's Almost Here

Six Apart offered us a look into their upcoming Movable Type version 3.2 via a month long (boy does time fly) Beta testing session. It was interesting to be a small part of the process and I only did what I could consider lightweight Beta testing compared to hammering that I'm sure others did. And that's fine because I found two (probably) obscure bugs, which were fixed. That's good that we each had some different perspective on testing in order to give the application a thorough test.

So that said, there are few more features that I'm hearing about that are making me even more excited about the new release (expected today unless chaos theory takes hold). I don't remember which release it was but with one of the last few releases of MT, they limited the number of blogs that you could have on an install depending on the license you had. I've been using the free version because I've been more in a playing mode than a serious mode. I am approaching serious mode now and am looking at the license prices. Anyway, with an unlimited number of weblogs for a single site, I can definitely see the potential to separate content. For example, "news" could be in one blog and static, information pages could be housed in another.

And then you can control the archiving types depending on the blog. I tried this once for my "quotes" list but found the duplicate maintenance of templates to cause more headaches than it's worth. A new feature in version 3.2 should make that headache go away. There will be the ability to maintain default templates above all the blogs. Now I really need to give that a test run. I have crazy grandiose plans for another website and this could solve my category-specific archiving type problem. For some categories, I just need a single category archive and for other categories I need individual archives. I was going to make a feature suggestion along those lines of defining archive types by category but maybe now I don't need to.

From what I hear, Adobe's GoLive CS2 supports MT tags to help with designing/implementing MT templates. Am I always late to the party or what? Since I needed to upgrade anyway, I ordered a copy of the CS2 suite (Professional of course in order to get GoLive). That should be here in about a week.

So much to do, so little time.

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