Six Apart announces Movable Type 3.0 and discloses a few of its upcoming features:
- Comment registration. As a response to both comment spam and to the increased usage of Movable Type on large community sites, we'll be adding the option to restrict comments to registered users.
- Improved comment and TrackBack management features.
- New API hooks for plugin developers. Plugins will now be able to hook into many more pieces of Movable Type, including adding callbacks for saving and removing objects, building application methods with integration into the UI, and hooking into the publishing process. This opens up possibilities for plugins to add even more advanced functionality than they're able to do now.
- User interface rebuilt using CSS. We've seen with TypePad that a CSS-based interface gives users very fast application response times, and gives us a flexible interface for making application-wide changes, and we want to give this same speed and flexibility to Movable Type users.
- Support for the Atom API. We've already added Atom syndication feed support in version 2.65 of Movable Type, and we'll be adding publishing support for the API in 3.0.
Jay Allen seems disappointed by the comment registration, which IMHO can be useful if offered as a flexible option.
Six Apart has also posted Movable Type 2.65, mostly a security update for the mt-send-entry.cgi vulnerability and a new XML-RPC security issue to lib/MT/XMLRPCServer.pm. If you have already fixed the former, you can fix the latter by simply replacing the old file by the new one. The only new feature is "an Atom syndication template in the default templates, along with an auto-discovery tag in the main index template." The padawan will simply patch XMLRPCServer.pm until Atom proves to be useful or MT 3.0 sneaks around.
Update: this is what Master Dean Allen has to say about Atom:
For those to whom this is all Greek, Atom is a new form of AI technology that visits all websites simultaneously, looking for anyone badmouthing you or those batting for your team; it responds by firing back custom-made insults and denunciations including but not limited to accusations of hypocrisy and pot-kettle-black.
[P.S. Silly and absolutely useless stat du jour: this is my 500th post on padawan.info]