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Movable Type 3.1 launched today

August 31, 2004

mt3-logo-small.gifSix Apart just announced this afternoon the release of Movable Type 3.1. Six Apart assured us the release was coming on August 31 and they delivered. Impressive for relatively new tech company.

lexBlog uses Moveable Type, with programming modifications, as the underlying software for our customer sites so we’re pretty pumped about some the upgrades 3.1 will allow us to provide our customers.

Straight from the blog of Mena Trott (co-founder of Six Apart), here’s a look at the major features in Movable Type 3.1.

Dynamic Pages

Six Apart says the most prominent new feature in MT 3.1 is the dynamic page functionality, allowing users to choose between static page generation or dynamic pages on a per-template basis. This allows users to optimize the performance of their blog.

Users can turn on static page generation for frequently-requested pages like your site index and feeds, and use dynamic pages for your monthly, individual, and other archive pages. This allows users to create the best balance of fast rebuilds and low web server load. Dynamic pages completely eliminate the need to manually rebuild your files; when users update the design of your archive templates, for example, the design of your site will immediately be updated without requiring you to rebuild.

lexBlog will examine this feature carefully as we do not want to do anything that willa jeopardize each page of our customers’ blogs being indexed by Google and the other search engines. Our concern with blog platforms that build dynamic pages is that, like data base driven Web sites, the search engines may not spider all the text deep in a database.

Subcategories

This is big one for us at lexBlog. Until now, we have had to do a lot of hacking to display subcategories for lexBlog customers. In addition, such hacking made it difficult, or impossible, for our customers to modify the main category headings.

The new category management interface in 3.1 gives users a fine-grained control over the organization and display of their posts. They can easily create new subcategories, and move a subcategory from one parent category to another using a sleek, intuitive interface.

Post Scheduling

Using post scheduling, a user can set a time and date for their posts to appear, permitting automatic updates to their blog even when they’re away. Users can keep their blog community up to date and involved by creating new posts in advance.

Better Development Features

No need to go into ‘tech geekism’s’ other than to say MT 3.1 is going to make it easier than ever for lexBlog to customize the software and calls form the database as well as use plugins that enhance our customers’ blogs. This benefits not only our law firm customers but also their clients and target audience, the ultimate readers of the blog.

Bottom line, I’m impressed with Six Apart and what they are doing to empower developers like lexBlog. lexBlog is providing lawyers and law firm marketing directors across this country one heck of an easy to use, cost effective marketing communications tool. I am happy to able to deploy Six Apart’s Movable Type to empower these lawyers and law firms.

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