New Movable Type version in Beta and it looks good

The newest version of Movable Type was released for public beta testing late yesterday and I'm very excited with what I've seen so far. As it is a testing version, I upgraded an in-development blog to give this new version a whirl.

I originally thought the CSS hadn't been completed for FireFox yet but it seems that was caching issue. I got nervous for a second because they are very on-top of the standards. Good thing I didn't send in a bug before trying it again. They have made nice progress on the interface design.

I definitely see improvements in the base commenting features. If you say no HTML that means tags are completely removed. It makes me feel safer so I'm definitely thinking that I will be adding comments and trackbacks to this web site once this version goes into official production. The master switch for comments and trackbacks should also prove interesting. It was set to off when I started. It took me a little while to figure out what was going on but I'll have to give that a try next to turn it back off.

There are a lot of changes in the interface and functionality but another key feature that caught my eye was a new entry field called "basename". The idea is to give the possible output file a unique name. Remember that I have troubles with my entry titles (which I use as part of my URL) and changing them. This, assuming I understand it correctly, will fix that.

The archive file naming looks interesting especially with the considering the new “basename” field. I may have to play with this one first to see how my existing file structure will work out. I don’t want to annoy Google too much too soon. Subcategories can also be specified in the URLs. Since I’m looking at adding new categories, the timing is perfect.

The upgrade itself was very easy. I just deleted my existing files (except for 2 config-related files) and uploaded the new ones. The system identified that it needed to upgrade and did its thing automatically. With this process being as simple as it was, I think I'll stay on top of the new versions much quicker in the future.

My one pet-peeve with MT to date is how apostrophes and quotes are handled when I copy/paste out of MS Word. It seems to keep the "special" version of the characters so that URLs break unless I change them individually in the MT interface. I'll have to try that one next.

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