When Six Apart first announced it would release an open source version of the popular blogging tool, Movable Type, it initially indicated that the open source variation would lack some of the features in the proprietary version. However the company seems to have changed its mind.

In a comment posted on the original announcement, Byrne Reese, Product Manager for Movable Type writes:

this is our current thinking:

• What will be MTOS will be available from subversion this month (November 2007) – actually MT 4.01 is available from svn now at code.sixapart.com/svn/movabletype/branches/athena
• The first release of MTOS will then be in December to coincide with the release of the next version of MT.
• The feature set of MTOS will be that of MT4.0. There will be no feature in MT4 that will be removed from MTOS.

Judging by these details, MTOS will be identical it MT4. While that’s great news for those looking forward to hacking (or just using) the open source version of MT, it raises some questions for commercial users — what do you get for your money?

Continue Reading “Details On The Open Source Version Of Movable Type” »

WordPress has rolled out an upgrade to the popular blogging tool adding native tagging support, plugin update notification, URL handling improvements and more. Version 2.3 of WordPress can be downloaded from WordPress.org.

Perhaps the most welcome news for WordPress users is the native tagging support which allows allows you to use tags in addition to the existing “categories” function (which many used as a tags replacement). Included in the new version are importers for a number of third party plugins so, if you?ve been using a plugin for tags, you can easily fold your data into the new system.

A more controversial new feature is the update notification which lets you know when there is a new release of WordPress and when any of the plugins you use has an update available.

There’s a long thread on the WordPress Google Group about this tidbit: “It works by sending your blog URL, plugins, and version information to our new api.wordpress.org service which then compares it to the plugin database and tells you what’s the latest and greatest you can use.”

Continue Reading “WordPress Update Causes Privacy Controversy” »