PRO IT Service Blog

We've launched a new section: Testimonials

2009-02-05T17:22:01Z

Unfortunately we've felt a bit this financial crisis, as most of our European customers were from the U.K. and Great Britain was strongly hit during October, November and December 2008. We had a good amount of work planned for a couple of large British companies, but we've lost it due to these contractors' financial problems. Adding to this detail that we didn't accept some projects to make sure we have enough room for these British contractors, you can get the picture. Anyway, rather than complaining or taking an unplanned holiday, I've decided to leverage the free time between some small projects to work on improving a bit our company Web site. I would like to refer here to what I consider the most important update, which is in fact a new section called Testimonials. As you may already be aware, PRO IT Service S.R.L. has been founded by myself way back in 2002 and since then we've server a couple of hundred of customers. Nevertheless this performance, we didn't have enough time to devote to mentioning these jobs under our portfolio, nor to consider adding a Testimonials section. Given the new circumstances, in November I've planned this testimonials section and I've started by contacting about 20 customers and asking them to provide us a testimonial. Some were very quick, some less and some are still to prepare a testimonial for us. On January the 19^th, 2009 after having collected about testimonials, I've decided it is the time to publish them online. This evening I've got a call from a contact telling me that he was impressed with what we found out about our company, but that he only seen a few testimonials. I've explained him that this section is just launched for about 3 weeks now. He though the section is as old as the company :) Anyway, I'm going to make clear on our Web site that this section is brand new. http://www.pro-it-service.com/en/testimonials.html

Thank you for 2008 and Happy New Year!

2009-01-09T09:07:41Z

I would like to thank all our customers for ending 2008 with another important business growth. Due to the amount of work and to the intention of expanding our team, during 2008 we’ve contracted a mortgage and bought a larger flat where to operate this new media business. Nevertheless the crisis which affected us a bit, as most of our customers are from the United States and from the United Kingdom, we closed the year with satisfactory financial results, but most of all, proud of the projects we’ve worked on. The plans we have for 2009 are to increase our team and to bring this business to the next stage by engaging a private investor and by expanding in one hand our customers base and on the other the number of services offered by hiring more people. Happy New Year! to all and hope this year will put an end to the financial crisis affecting the global market.

Movable Type upgraded to version 4.23. Consultant available!

2008-12-04T06:20:43Z

Six Apart announced a new Movable Type version which, according to the press release, it is a mandatory security release recommended for all users and fixes a good number of bugs from version 4.21. On a side note, you should know that there was no version 4.22, so don't worry that after v4.21 the movable type crew launched v4.23 (it's a long story that is not made public yet). Looking at the change log, I've noticed that I've dealt with some of the bugs fixed in this new release. I should express my gratefulness to Six Apart for putting together this improved movable type version. Are you having your own Movable Type installation? Are you interested for an upgrade? I'm available to upgrade your Movable Type installation to v4.23. Get in touch via the contact page form... You may like to check the movable type v4.23 change log below. 55719: Selecting for tag in MTEntries loop that doesn't exist on the blog yields an incomplete error

Fixed a bug for the Entries/Assets tags when using the "tags" attribute along with a non-existent tag. This will now no longer result in a template build error (thanks to Jay Allen for reporting the issue).

81318: ID conflict in Community Forum template set config

Fixed a bug in the Community Forum template set for the Category Groups widget.

81430: Template types lost for weblog with Universal Website template set applied after upgrading to MT 4.2

Fixed a bug with the Universal Template set so that template types ("main_index", etc.) are recognized.

81689: Upgrade should map index templates set to not rebuild with indexes to be published "Manually"

Fixed an upgrade issue around index templates that were configured to "not rebuild with indexes" so they are now assigned the "Manual" publishing option.

81755: TrackBack.pm throws errors when no title set on trackback

Fixed a bug affecting the TrackBack listing screen when no title is assigned to one or more TrackBack pings (thanks to Michele Neylon for reporting the issue).

81922: Select 'High Priority Static Publishing' does generate error.

Fixed a bug affecting selection of the "High Priority Static Publishing" publishing profile.

82155: 'Removing unused template maps' step is very slow for large upgrades

Optimized the upgrade process for the "Removing unused template maps" upgrade step.

81407: MT 4.2 - > widget sets not cloning when you clone a blog

Fixed a bug that prevented the cloning of Widget Sets when a blog is cloned (thanks to Alex Cacciamani for reporting the issue).

80799: Blogs disappear when choosing new layout while using fastcgi

Fixed a bug affecting system functionality when applying a new theme using StyleCatcher and running in a persistent environment.

80975: Unable to delete all categories and subcategories at once

Fixed a bug that prevented the deletion of categories when they had subcategories assigned to them.

81050: Feedback: (FireFox3) URL is rewritten when switching editor mode on create entry screen

Fixed a bug under Firefox 3 that caused relative URLs to be rewritten as full URLs when switching between the text editor and the richtext editor and then back again.

81066: setvar attribute fails under SetHashVar

Added support for assigning hash variable elements using the 'setvar' attribute (thanks to Jay Allen for the suggestion).

81071: Publish archives setting error goes to General Settings

Fixed a bug that redirected a user to the "General" blog settings screen when getting an error while trying to save blog publishing settings.

81417: Debugging code in StyleCatcher plugin causes 502 error when applying a theme (IIS)

Removed some debug logging code from StyleCatcher that was causing an error under Windows/IIS when applying a new theme.

81361: Can't delete (or otherwise act on) templates from the global search screen

Fixed a bug preventing template actions from working for the global template listing screen (thanks to Jay Allen for reporting the issue supplying a patch).

81403: Not execute rebuild_options code

Fixed a bug affecting the operation of custom site rebuild options.

79723: Error Message Buttons Can Lead Users In Unproductive Circles

Fixed various issues for the buttons displayed on the error messaging shown when saving and publishing an index/archive template.

80788: link error displays in a pop-up window

Fixed a bug on Windows that caused links to the popup window for an uploaded image to use '\' characters instead of '/'.

81077: Create Entry by XML-RPC to Community Template blog which have Date CF generate error

Fixed a bug that prevented the assignment of custom date and date-time fields via XMLRPC.

81153: "Go Back" From Error Publishing Entry Does Not Return to Edit Entry Screen

Fixed various issues for the "Go Back" button on the error message shown when publishing an entry or page.

81241: Cannot Select '0' (Zero) or Blank Option in Custom Field Drop Down Menu

Fixed a bug that prevented the user from choosing a '0' or blank option for a drop-down-menu custom field.

82162: MTAuthorBasename tag not implemented for dynamic publishing

Added support for the MTAuthorBasename tag to the dynamic publishing engine.

82172: Page saved with no title cannot be accessed from the page listing screen

Fixed a bug that prevented pages without titles from being editable on the page listing screen (thanks to Jay Allen for reporting the issue and supplying a patch).

81846: Template list filters are hardcoded in MT 4.2

Fixed a bug that prevented plugin-supplied listing filters from working on the template listing screen.

81896: L10N: Publish archives setting error

Fixed a JavaScript bug that occurred when checking the "Publish archives outside of Site Root" and attempting to save with an empty archive site root or archive site URL field.

81588: MTDate requires blog_id in context and produces Perl error if none is provided

Fixed a bug affecting the MTDate tag when used without a blog context (thanks to Brian M. Petersen for reporting the issue and supplying a patch).

81928: Empty Widget Sets output content from previously created widget set

Fixed an issue with Widget Sets when saving a widget set without any widgets in it.

82050: "Entries with comments in the last 7 days" quick filter list entries from last 10 days instead of last 7 days

Fixed a bug with the entry listing filter "Entries with comments in the last 7 days" (it was displaying 10 days worth).

82146: Feed of the tag search doesn't work without specifying blog_id

Fixed a bug that prevented a tag search feed from working without a "blog_id" parameter.

81834: MT::WeblogPublisher::rebuild_indexes does not correctly ascertain blog from passed template

Fixed an API bug in MT::WeblogPublisher's "rebuild_indexes" method so that it derives the blog in context based on the supplied template, when invoked with a specific template to rebuild but without a blog parameter.

81073: L10N: Logs need to be translated, which are logged when creating professional website

Improved Japanese localization for the Professional Website template set.

78989: 'Close' button should be removed from the error screen

When the MT error screen is displayed in a full browser window, the "Close" button is now suppressed.

82544: Disallow angle brackets for key user fields

Username, display name, email address and URL profile fields no longer permit use of angle brackets.

82723: remove_html can be tricked using CDATA blocks

Improved handling of remove_html with multiple CDATA blocks.

82474: [XSS] Profile View template does not escape user's display name

SECURITY: Added escape="html" modifier to templates in Community.pack and Movable Type default templates to escape the name of authors and commenters properly. Note that the change requires refreshing of these templates. If the templates are modified and cannot be refreshed easily, you can add escape="html" to all of the occurances of MTEntryAuthorUsername, MTAuthorDisplayName, MTEntryAuthorDisplayName and MTCommenterName in the publicly facing templates.

82498: Category groups template is not found

Fixed a bug that was occurring when a template set re-uses template identifiers but with varying types (widget/category_groups and widgetset/category_groups, for instance).

82499: [XSS] User archive name on published Community Blog template

Fixed HTML encoding of archive titles when markup exists in category/folder labels and author display names.

81291: [XSS report] more places to escape?

Improved handling of HTML markup in the CMS app for several listing and edit screens.

81529: Textarea custom field for User objects causes error

Fixed a bug regarding the use of multi-line custom fields that display on a user's profile edit screen.

81574: Author archive path does not respect archive mapping or dirify

Fixed a bug affecting author archives that publish using the author basename and "-" characters instead of "_".

81579: contributors can publish entries through the 'manage entries' interface

Fixed a permissions bug where a user with "create post" permission and no "publish post" permission could still publish posts from a system-wide entry listing screen.

81666: Author archive republishing is endlessly looping when there a disabled author has an author archive

Fixed a bug that caused author archives to loop repeatedly when publishing them when there are one or more disabled authors associated with the blog.

81697: Oracle DBI deaths

Fixed an issue with the Oracle database driver to prevent issuing queries that exceed the maximum number of items permitted in an "IN" clause.

81797: MSSQLServer too slow because of the frequent calls to DBI::ping

Improved overall performance for the Microsoft SQL Server database driver.

81943: Actions without event description in profile actions listing screen

Fixed a bug affecting Action Stream events when using Memcached.

82007: MTArchiveList tag displays an author archive link for every entry instead of just one link (MS-SQL Server and Oracle)

Fixed a bug affecting MS SQL Server and Oracle and the functionality of the MTArchiveList tag and author archives.

81918: MT4.2 profile template renders differently when accessed via mod_rewrite URL (MVN)

Fixed an issue with recognizing a user viewing their own profile when the profile is accessed by username instead of user ID.

82201: Cannot save custom field data

Fixed a bug affecting editing custom fields on a user's profile page.

82290: Restore fails if the name of the user who did backup contains "<"

Fixed a bug with restoring a blog where author(s) name contains a '<' character.

81939: favorites appear on unpublished entries

Fixed an issue where an entry that has been "favorited" by a user still appear on their profile even after unpublishing the entry.

81858: [XSS] TrackBack title and other input may bypass sanitization

Improved filtering support for our HTML sanitization library.

81861: Unable to attach profile image to user who have Contributor permission

Fixed a bug preventing a user with a limited "contributor" role from uploading a userpic to their profile.

81800: file_ext does not work in MTEntryAssets

Fixed a bug affecting the "file_ext" attribute of the MTEntryAssets tag.

81806: 'Format' attribute broken on 'Date' custom fields

Added support for a 'format' attribute for date/time custom field tags.

81788: Upload of the file of the same name will overwrite a thumbnail

Fixed an filename conflict issue where two users could upload an thumbnail image with the same filename.

81790: Contents of Custom Fields are not saved when an entry is previewed

Fixed a bug that prevented the saving of custom field data after previewing an entry/page.

81677: Sign In module in Global Templates has wrong js call

Fixed a JavaScript bug in the "Sign In" widget for the Community Blog template set.

81617: asset metadata error on upgrade to mt4.21

Fixed a bug affecting the upgrade of asset metadata with Microsoft SQL Server.

81624: MT:Actions not pulling the latest entries

Fixed an issue with ordering of items on a user's profile view, so that all entries are listed by their authored-on date, rather than their creation date.

81658: Upgrade script (4.21) runs out of memory with large # of entries in mt_permission

Improved performance and resource utilization of the upgrade process when using the command-line "upgrade" script.

]]>

How To Troubleshoot Text Formatting Issues When Taking Content From Ms Word?

2008-10-17T13:42:26Z

I've had a customer complaining today that he has some text formatting issues when copying and pasting content that he wrote with Ms Word into his Movable Type v4.21 driven Web site. The client was wondering if he is doing something wrong, as some other posts already published on his Web site were looking impeccable. My dears, the problem is well known with a very large range of blogging tools and content management systems (CMS). The work around this trouble is to Save the document As "Web Page, Filtered (*.htm, *.html)". After choosing the new format, Ms Word will alert you that if you go ahead with the 'Save As' command you've just ordered will remove 'Office-specific' tags. Since this is actually the goal with going through this 'Save As' procedure, you should click 'Yes' on that alert window. At this stage you can safely copy and paste content from this new format document into your publishing platform, Movable Type or not. This will solve your text formatting problem after trying to copy and paste content from a document wrote in Ms Word.

Why is it important to upgrade Movable Type?

2008-09-03T11:45:52Z

Why is it important to upgrade Movable Type? I bet many of you bloggers, have been wondering at least a few times in life: "- Why should I upgrade my blogging platform?" "- Why do I have to upgrade movable type when the current version does what I want to do with it. I just need to post my articles and that's it!". Well, we are passing a period when absolutely any technology we are using, either it is for blogging or any thing else, movable type, word press, joomla, whatever... they all have security issues that could be exploited sooner or later... This is the case also with Movable Type and the crew at Six Apart together with the Pronet community are doing their best to discover and fix any bug or security holes. What is nice about Movable Type is that the company behind it listens to the bloggers community and converts their ideas into practice with each and every version. This is a second reason to go for an upgrade! My professional advice to you is to always keep your blogging platform updated to the most recent stable built. At this stage you may wonder: "- But where could I find a movable type consultant to upgrade the installation for me?" "- How much does upgrading movable type cost?" "- Is it worth spending a certain amount of money to upgrade movable type?" You are here at the right place to ask for a movable type upgrade service. We are successfully doing this service for so many customers that we've already lost the counting. The main reasons bloggers choose us to upgrade their movable type installations is that the cost for an upgrade is as low as 100 USD, which is a very competitive rate in this business and this amount is really worth for your publishing experience. You will discover that with every movable type upgrade your blogging experience is better. The menu is better organized, there are extra options and features and overall your movable type satisfaction is increased. You've read till here, but you may wonder: "- Alright, I understand everything so far. But, give me some tangible reasons to upgrade to movable type v4.2 or movable type v4.21 which seems to be the most recent version. BTW, why there are two v4.2x versions?"]]>
1. Movable Type v4.2 Publishing Speed (Fastest) You may have had issues with movable type not being very fast when publishing or updating articles. This version is the fastest movable type version so far. Six Apart started to rewrite certain modules and to also optimize the native search function. As a matter of fact publishing or updating pages is faster and the search function is up to 100 times faster. There is no typing mistake here!... The search is up to one hundred times faster!

2. Movable Type v4.2 Security (Most Secure)

When developing v4.2, apart from fixing a number of security vulnerabilities Six Apart took a few procedures to make sure they will find as much security issues as possible. In this light they've incorporated third party tools that routinely scan for vulnerabilities, centralized and augmented input filtering and finally conducted a line-by-line security audit. I do trust that Movable Type v4.2 is the most secure built we've had so far. Obviously, as a passionate programmer and developer for over 10 years I can tell you that security doesn't exist. Security is more a concept than a reality. Sooner or later someone will discover new back doors on any technology. What is important though is to know that you're using a product whose producer cares about their customers and continuously tries to give you a secure environment to that moment technology's standard. There are many other technical details regarding that Movable Type v4.2 gives you extra comparing to prior versions. I will just tell you that now Movable Type Professional is absolutely free to bloggers and anybody which doesn't contact a business with it. More that that, the professional version allows you to create static-like web sites, blogs, forums and community sites. For more information check out: http://www.movabletype.org/2008/08/movable_type_42_is_here.html As for the difference between Movable Type v4.2 and Movable Type v4.21, the most recent one contains a couple of bug fixes that the community discovered after the launch of Movable Type v4.2 This being said I strongly encourage you to upgrade your movable type installation to the most recent version, in our case these days, movable type v4.21 It is also advisable that you are using a professional for this operation. If you need someone to do it for you, you may like to get in touch with us using the contact page form. The movable type installation upgrade cost is just 100 USD. For this amount you are 100% assured that your installation will be upgraded, there won't be any data loss or features which to stop working. The movable type upgrade job passes a very strict and professional quality assurance policy!

Movable Type goes v4.21. Upgrade patch available!

2008-08-22T14:42:29Z

Six Apart come up with an excellent news! There are just 10 days since Movable Type v4.2 has been launched. People from all over the world identified quite a series of bugs on what was meant to be the most secure and quick movable type version seen so far. In an effort to make the whole community happy and isolate these bugs ASAP, the movable type crew launched today movable type v4.21. Since there were quite two important bugs reported as being fixed, I didn't think twice and started to upgrade all the movable type installations I've recently upgraded to v4.2. Believe me, there were quite a few dozens and re-upgrading them would have been a nightmare unless I would have just uploaded the files that changed in the new release Felt like this could be a problem other people may face, I've also made available online two patches (one for movable type professional and another for the open source version) which will let somebody upgrade from v4.2 to v4.21 is just a minute or so http://www.movabletype4.org/2008/08/movable_type_v421_patch.html Remember that anytime you need help with movable type installation, movable type upgrades from any version to any version, or any kind of movable typo consultancy service, you could ask for it here via instant messaging, email, contact form or phone call Happy blogging everyone!

Movable Type v4.2 is live! The time for upgrades :)

2008-08-13T12:34:17Z

I'm extremely excited that Six Apart just launched Movable Type v4.2 Last night I was driving back home and at a light stop I've picked up my cell phone and accessed my main email box. When I've seen Anil Dash's announcement that Movable Type v4.2 was released I really felt an extraordinary sensation Instead of dropping off at home, I went to a local shop and brought in a beer for celebrating the event! I know, I should have got a Champaign, but I will consider it for the next Le Web 3 in Paris when I will meet the Six Apart crew again The new Movable Type is faster than ever, for certain operations such as the search is even up to 100 times faster! The great news in top of this is that at PRO IT Service we've made available the Open Source and the Professional versions of this release absolutely free for anybody to check and evaluate online at: http://www.movabletype4.org/ Furthermore, we've already upgraded a couple of blogs to v4.2 and everything looks excellent! We've started this operation with the movable type web sites that we host or that we contract for the upgrading service Do you want somebody to install or upgrade your Movable Type installation for you? Just ask using the contact form above! You may also want to: Check out more about the new release at: http://www.movabletype.org/2008/08/movable_type_42_is_here.html View an absolutely free online demo at: http://www.movabletype4.org/ (service provided worldwide by PRO IT Service)

Recoding Movable Type Projects Based On The Movable Type 4 Templating System

2008-02-21T23:35:12Z

I'm going to call this a day, but I won't like to go and get a good nap before sharing with you a few notes based on a project I've worked on today Lynne Kiesling from http://www.knowledgeproblem.com/ contacted me saying that she needs help with her Movable Type weblog. Basically, nevertheless she was used to Movable Type and upgraded it herself over the years, she recently encountered problems after upgrading to Movable Type v4.01 that were "beyond my coding capabilities" as she kindly mentioned. She wanted me to recode her project templates based on the MT4 framework, to install a new Web site theme from the ones available online and to also add some other features I've already coded a couple of projects since Movable Type v4.x entered the scene, but I should say that it was indeed a pleasure to recode her project. Recoding a movable type Web site based on the v3.x framework into the new framework, with all the new principles introduced by v4.x apart from the excitement it brings could have also a weak point and that is called heavy "publishing times" Six Apart tried to make this product as simple and intuitive as possible for any blog owner to be able to edit the template, go though all the included modules, create or manage widgets from the side column(s) and more. Taking as an example only the "Widget Sets" facility which, nevertheless allows you to easily update your Movable Type Web site side bar(s) by dragging and dropping widgets, regenerating all those widgets could be a problem if we are talking about large blogs My today's client was contained 2271 posts! Imagine Movable Type trying to always generate the side bar for each individual article page, then for the categories, monthly archives and indexes!... The whole rebuilding process took above 4 hours on the v4.x templating architecture, while based on the v3.x architecture it took only 12 minutes I couldn't let this customer wait so much for a simple rebuild, so I've worked a bit on optimizing the publishing time which is a consultancy service we're long offering at PRO IT Service Without sacrificing any of the very nice features included on the MT 4 templating architecture I've been able to reduce the publishing time from 4 hours and 18 minutes to almost 16 minutes which is indeed a performance As a professional solutions provider my goal is to try to make the publishing time even better than how it was when the site templates were based on the v3.x architecture, so within 12 minutes. Because it already got quite late, I will focus on this item first thing in the morning. Stay tuned :)]]>

Movable Type Design Assistant: Styles Live Customization is Here

2008-02-08T18:11:22Z

Six Apart just revealed an excellent new tool they are working on and which allows you to easily pick up a new look and feel for your Web site from a Styles Library.

Style Catcher Next Generation

Those of you that have heard or used Style Catcher, the new product is like a Style Catcher next generation and allows you not only to choose and adopt a new look and feel, but to also modify the layout characteristics as you like. Movable Type Design Assistant comes also with an easier and more intuitive interface which guides you throughout the whole new design adopting process.

Each Design Comes In Six Layout Formats

Another excellent feature is that each and every style from the library is available in not less than six possible layout formats covering actually the most popular layout structures currently available online.

These six layout formats are:

[NULL] [/NULL]

Layout-wtt (3 columns: Wide, Thin, Thin)

Layout-twt (3 columns: Thin, Wide, Thin)

Layout-wt (2 columns: Wide, Thin)

Layout-tw (2 columns: Thin, Wide)

Layout-wm (2 columns: Wide, Medium)

Layout-mw (2 columns: Medium, Wide)

]]>
Personalization As I've been mentioning above, Movable Type Design Assistant allows you to customize your new look and feel anyway you like. Basically you can apply and preview modifications to a design using CSS, all in real time, completely live! This way you can manage basically anything you could imagine: columns dimensions, background, fonts, colors etc. Once you are satisfied with your new layout preview, if you want to apply it to your blog, all you have to do is to copy it from the Movable Type Design Assistant and paste it on your blog.

Support

Nevertheless Movable Type Design Assistant interface is very intuitive, there is also a very handy "Learn More" area for you to find additional Movable Type design resources and Six Apart's recommended reading list for learning and mastering stylesheets.

Licensing and Download

Movable Type Design Assistant is available under a GPL license and could be downloaded in beta version from Six Apart code repository. Developers are encouraged to take it, check it and make edits and improvements as they see fit. See it in action here: http://www.movabletype.org/design/assistant/

Do you need your own Movable Type Design?

You may like to know that at PRO IT Service, as movable type consultants, we could help you design your own movable type style or movable type theme, as well as change or adapt any theme you like. Further more, we could also help you with any trouble you're encountering with the Movable Type Design Assistant. Just get in touch!

Plans

While the entire movable type community considers this new tool an excellent facility for rapidly creating and adopting a new look and feel for a movable type blog, Six Apart announced their development plans before releasing this product final version. On their to do list, Six Apart mentioned:

more styles to start with;
more layouts to choose from;
easier ways to apply styles to your blog;
and some great social sharing features to help you learn from, and benefit from, the incredibly generous and talented community of designers who use Movable Type.

The concept doesn't stop here. Apart from the items on the above to do list, in the future Six Apart will also work to:

improve compatibility with Internet Explorer 6 and 7;
include additional base styles to choose from;
package it as a plugin so that the process of applying custom styles can be completely automated;
include support for additional template sets so that users can more easily customize the style of sets like the Universal Template Set

As a movable type passionate supporter working with this product since early 2003, I advise you all to give a look to the "Movable Type Design Assistant" as an excellent solution for identifying, further customizing and adopting a new Web site look and feel. Movable Type Design Assistant is another reason to choose Movable Type for those not yet decided what blogging platform to use for their projects.

Upgrading to Movable Type Open Source v4.1

2008-02-02T19:13:36Z

It's quite some time since I didn't publish anything new in here Well, I've had a very busy time with my work and I've also been in London for about 2 weeks with business meeting a few already established customers and also meeting a few new prospects The time I had in London was great. I was leaving near London Bridge and London Tower, two very nice places in Zone 1 not far from the Westminster and Buckingham Palaces. During my stay in London the Movable Type Crew at Six Apart launched Movable Type v4.1 in two versions, one Commercial and the other Open Source. Nevertheless I've made these two versions available online for free testing at movabletype4.org I didn't have the time to try to actually upgrade one of my customers' version. However, today I've had the opportunity to do my first upgrade from movable type v3.35 to movable type v4.1 open source. The transition was very nice, nevertheless I had to do a few tweaks to make sure all he had before works also on this new version. If I will be to upgrade all our customers I will go beyond 200 movable type instances :) However, if you need to upgrade your movable type driven web site from any version to any other version just get in touch using the contact form and I or my technicians would be more than glad to do this job for you in a professional manner.

Movable Type Security Update: Engineers Available

2008-01-17T18:09:17Z

Movable Type just issued a security update that should be applied to any movable type version since Movable Type v3.2 Basically, in affected versions of Movable Type, there are certain circumstances in which a blog template may be rendered dynamically via CGI in an otherwise static publishing context. If you use Movable Type to publish PHP files (or JSP or ASP pages) and have embedded within your Movable Type templates sensitive information (such as database connection information), then that sensitive information could potentially be exposed and viewed publicly.]]> Detailed Security Issue Description:

When a script is executed on a web server it can only be processed by a single interpreter (e.g. Perl, PHP, Java, etc). In other words, a perl script cannot output PHP code that can then subsequently be processed by the PHP interpreter later in the request chain. Scripts should therefore only output content intended for a browser. In Movable Type this may pose a problem when the Individual Entry Archive template is used to output static PHP (or JSP, ASP, etc) files to the file system. In the event that these templates are processed dynamically and displayed via a CGI then the server side code that they contain will become visible to the outside world. This can only occur when the Individual Archive Template is used to display comments dynamically. There is an additional script in use by a very small number of users called mt-view.cgi which exhibits a similar behavior. Generally speaking, this in and of itself may not pose a security threat, unless of course your templates output sensitive information intended to be processed by the server only, such as a database connection information or other sensitive information.

The Six Apart engineers issued updates for the following products:

Movable Type v3.2
Movable Type v3.3x (issued v3.36)
Movable Type v4.x (issued v4.01a)
Movable Type Enterprise
Movable Type Community Solution
Movable Type Enterprise Solution

PRO IT Service is glad to be offering you a professional movable type upgrade service and protect your weblog from any potential security risks If you are interested on having one of our engineers handle your movable type upgrade just drop us a line using the contact form or if you see us online, the instant messaging platform from the side column For the official announcements you may like to click here!

Happy New Year 2008!

2008-01-08T08:37:24Z

I would like to thank you all for the great success that PRO IT Service, the company that I'm personally ruling registered this year Nevertheless we had a very busy time, the results we've achieved were extraordinary The New Year holiday inspired us with an even more ambitious developing plan that we would like to put in practice during 2008. Stay tuned ;-) Within the following month I'm going to list for you some of the projects we've been involved during 2007 and we feel like mentioning on our Web site

PRO IT Service is now partner of Six Apart Europe

2007-12-12T20:29:00Z

Today was the second and last day of the "Le Web 3" forth edition conference here in Paris, France I must say the conference was very interesting and I enjoyed it a lot. Cannot wait for the video registration to become available online so that I could link to it from here for whoever is interested The main reason I’ve attended Le Web 3 this year is actually an invitation I’ve got from Six Apart to meet the whole team in person, get to know each other a bit and make official the partnership we’ve signed just a few days ago Basically, for a couple of days my company is an official partner of Six Apart for Europe. (here above there is a photo with the Six Apart team at Le Web 3, including Chris Alden which is the CEO and Chairman of Six Apart’s Board of Directors. I'm the third from right to left) Here at PRO IT Service S.R.L. we are very happy that Six Apart appreciated the work we did over the last couple of years using Movable Type and the effort we’ve made to evangelize this excellent publishing platform If you got to know me or my team you already know that we are not going to stop here! Among our plans there is a partnership with Six Apart North America since most of our customers come from the US market, and a few other wonderful initiatives related to making this product even more popular

Finance Web Site And Blog Development: The MoneyOutlet.co.uk

2007-11-29T13:26:02Z

As a passionate Movable Type Consultant (some folks like my design skills and call me Movable Type Designer) I'm impatient unless I code a good number of Movable Type projects every week. They are all very nice projects and I would love to find some time to write about each and every one of them, but as you know we are living in a speedy era and time is tight. However, I cannot resist the temptation and will share with you a project I've delivered recently which focuses on finance called The MoneyOutlet.co.uk. Basically it's a Web site built entirely in Movable Type which covers the following finance areas: Loans, Mortgages, Credit Cards, Insurance, Banking, General Finance News & Articles. I was again so fortunate to be building this Web site from the very roots. Everything started from the layout that the customer designed in PhotoShop. We've then had a few sessions over skype and agreed to make some changes that would improve the search engine optimization. Once the reference design in PhotoShop was ready, I've started to slice the images and code it in xhtml/css tableless Web page format. ]]> http://www.moneyoutlet.co.uk/

London, Paris and The Forth Edition of Le Web 3

2007-11-27T13:02:44Z

It’s quite some time since I didn’t publish anything here and I feel like sharing with you what I’ve been doing during the last month Apart from building up new movable type projects, optimizing some other movable type heavy web sites or coding web site interfaces, I’ve been traveling to London where I’ve spent three wonderful weeks I’ve been to London partly with business and partly for fun. I’ve been working on the U.K. way back in 2004 on the North West for quite some time, but I really wanted to also spend some time in London It’s useless to tell you that I’ve found London a wonderful place and nevertheless I’ve lived in Rome for a few years and traveled around the Europe quite a lot, I would relocate to London anytime now

The Future of The Internet

What makes this time of the year even more intriguing is the fourth edition of LeWeb3 which will take place in Paris on December the 11th and the 12th. I’ve received an invitation to this event and I would gladly participate. LeWeb3 is widely regarded as Europe's largest web conference and is one of the most important dates in the tech calendar. This year's program, featuring high-caliber speakers such as Robert Scoble (PodTech), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn) and Tariq Krim (Netvibes), is expected to draw up to 2000 participants from around the world to discuss the future of the Internet. For more information on the event, you may like to see www.leweb3.com.