PRO IT Service Blog

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/

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.

Another Food Blog Is Up: The Japanese Food Report

2007-10-11T18:24:18Z

Some time ago I was talking about a customer coming in asking me to work on his "Japanese Food Report" Web site saying that I've been referred by a few important people on this industry and that I'm very popular on the US :) Based on the same idea as Chocolate & Zucchini or Harvest Wizard, this Web site will be focused on healthy food and recipes, especially from the Japanese kitchen. The time is up and his Web site is now launched online! ]]> XHTML/CSS tableless format, integrating it within Movable Type v4.01 and ending with integrating a series of Movable Type extra facilities such as: Professional Print Out, Instant Search, RSS Feeds Subscription, Tags and Tag Cloud, Pinging, SEO facility, Google / MSN / Yahoo Sitemap, Google Analytics online tracking and more. The site is launching these days, Harris currently experimenting with the system. A couple of nice features will be automatically revealed online in the coming days. Among this features there is a "Stories" section on the left hand column displaying the thumbnails of the latest fours stories from no. 14 to 17, a "Support Our Sponsors" section and also a "Support Our Friends" section on the right hand column which will display sponsors and friends automatically as Harris will be uploading them to the system. The entire system is automatic, the client didn't have to bother about touching the templates, Movable Type or any programming. In developing this project I had to also patch Movable Type and add a couple of custom / extra fields. I must end thanking Harris for his interest on our services. It was really nice working with him and we look forward to grow up this project together and continuously enrich it with new and exciting features. Are you ready for a nice journey on the Japanese kitchen? Go and check it out at: http://www.japanesefoodreport.com/ The Web site is supposed to be indexed in Google within 72 hours

Political Blog Development: NewsAndPolicy.com

2007-10-10T09:21:45Z

The 2008 US Elections are getting closer and while preparing the road for another Political Blog, in fact entire publishing system, I just felt like mentioning a nice project I've built up and launched recently. NewsAndPolicy.com is an Influential Breaking Story Portal and Weblog focusing on Breaking News, Video News, Opinion and Analysis, Terror Watch, Politics, Media, Business and more. Developed for Zimakor Communications Company LLC, a publishing company from California, USA, the Web site is made of a blog, news section and tv newsroom ]]> XHTML/CSS tableless format, integrating it within Movable Type and then building up a broad range of extra facilities such as:

Professional Print Out;
Comments Anti Spam;
Daily Digest Email Subscription;
Send Article to a Friend;
Social Bookmarking Services Integration;
Google / Yahoo / MSN Sitemap;
RSS Feeds Subscription;
Tags and Tag Cloud;
Instant Search;
Paginated Archives;
Google Analytics online tracking;
SEO Facility;
Pinging;
Visitor Count and automatic Most Popular / Most Viewed display;
BlogRoll Facility;
Bold Digg and Stumble Upon bookmarking facilities;
Related Articles;
and more.

What is also nice about this project is that the client has full control over the Web site without having to bother about Movable Type or any programming. Featuring an article from any of the three sections (blog, news and tv newsroom) to be listed as a breaking story, pushing articles to the home page or to the today's top news or adding/customizing categories are all very easily doable. We've also shipped this publishing platform with a small manual describing in detail how each section works and what are the best practices for assuring excellent publishing standards. The site was launched on July the 20th, 2007 and in less than 3 months it already got over 300 comments, 50k weekly visitors and 22.700 mentions on Google, some of these mentions from reputable world newspapers. http://www.newsandpolicy.com/

Gabcast: Free Podcast Creation And Hosting

2007-10-04T13:17:01Z

Gabcast.com is a podcasting and audioblogging platform that offers virtual communities, individuals and organizations an easy way to create and distribute audio content. Most people will use a touch-tone telephone to make their recordings but Gabcast.com also provide worldwide access to the service through VoIP. Once you have made a recording and have published it, a newsfeed is immediately and automatically updated to alert subscribers to your channel. What is nice about this service is that content can be directly posted to your blog from there. As a podcaster, you can use Gabcast.com to do the legwork and can easily sync Gabcast to your iTunes. Sign up is free and allows 200 MB of storing space, an episode maximum length being 1 hour. For more disk space you can choose between a Pro bundle which costs 6 USD and gives you 400 MB storage and a few more features or the Premium bundle which costs 12 USD and gives you 1000 MG of storage along with a personalized player.
What Can You Do With Gabcast?

You can embed a flash audio player into your personal or corporate website/blog and communicate with your friends/family/colleagues/customers
You can voice your political opinions or use it as part of a political campaign
You can record Greetings
You can be a Citizen Reporter
You can conduct Interviews
You can use it as an Educational Tool
You can use it for Get-togethers
You can Speak Your Mind
You can use it to describe an item for sale on Ebay (Show Me!)

Gabcast supports the following blogs:

Blogger2: Blogger Beta
Blogger: Blogger and BlogSpot
Friendster
InsaneJournal
Life With Christ
LiveJournal
Travelling Guy
TypePad
WordPress

Movable Type and any other blogging platforms could be easily added through a custom blog interface, the API type available being Blogger API, Atom API and gdata.]]>

Getting in Love With Movable Type

2007-10-01T10:26:57Z

I've started my web development career way back in 1997, with over 10 years ago Over time I've got an excellent experience in this field, in one hand by delivering web programming courses in Bucharest and later in Rome for FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations), as well as working on various consultancy and development projects for private persons, to organizations of all sizes. Something extraordinary happen way back in 2003 when I've discovered Movable Type and adopted it for a major publishing platform I've been working with, later becoming its Technical Director. Having a technical background and an always pro attitude, the desire to discover as much as possible about Movable Type framework and how far can I go with adopting it as a possible CMS for a broader range of projects came in naturally.

At professional level, the relationship between me as a Web Developer and Movable Type as the Development Environment was so happy that I've really got in love with this publishing platform.

Being able to control and adapt Movable Type for absolutely any time of Web site from static Web sites to blogs or online communities became a reality. Since end of 2005 - beginning of 2006, all the projects I've coded and they were more than 200 entire projects, plus a few other hundreds of little jobs have all been based on Movable Type as a CMS (Content Management System). The marriage with Movable Type is so happy because I could code absolutely everything I need to make sure all the projects I'm working with will be a success. Among the facilities I really like coding in top of Movable Type I would mention especially: search engine optimization facilities and podcasting support, but also social networks integration and all the other facilities described at http://www.pro-it-service.com/en/movabletype_extra_facilities.html

Full Featured Podcasting, Photo Gallery and Custom Blogroll Solution for Movable Type v4.x

2007-09-23T18:42:27Z

Yesterday among work on a couple of projects, I've finalized a small project for a Bat Group, sub-contacting it from an UK-based company. My assignments on this job were:

to setup a full featured Podcasting Facility;
to setup a Photo Gallery;
to develop a professional way to manage groups of side links to other Web sites;
to do a couple of changes around such as: a custom banner, a top site navigation, some editorial changes on the sides and a footer navigation.

Nevertheless I've personally established the Movable Type v4.0 demo Web site, I've preferred to continue coding Web sites based on Movable Type v3.35 just because, you know, it's always best to not switch to a new platform until it passes the test of time :) This doesn't mean that I didn't work with Movable Type v4.0 Web sites at all, but comparing to an average of 15 to 20 Movable Type v3.35 projects a month working on Movable Type v4.0 projects was insignificant. I must say that I found the new system versatile, but also a bit limited in certain aspects, especially plugins, but not only.

Full Featured Podcasting

Setting up the podcasting was something quite nice. As on any project I work, I always try to keep things simple for the customer, but reach the best technical result. This being said I've programmed a system whereby whenever the customer adds a video or an audio file the system automatically plugs a video or an audio player. For the video player, I've proposed a nice player which among from a series of nice features, allows also full screen preview. As for the audio player, we've chosen a simple solution which to basically play.mp3 audio files In addition, obviously, the RSS Feeds are containing the podcasting files enclosures for people to be able to view the podcasts in various tools such as iTunes. Further more I thought that adding automatically a download text and link for people to download the file being played would be even better. Said and done. Isn't it so convenient to start podcasting when you don't have to bother about players or technical stuff? You just use the file upload Movable Type tool and upload the file to the server and tadam, the player and a download text link are automatically provided.

Photo Gallery

Well, when it came to setting up the Photo Gallery I've tried to see if there is any plugin available for this version of Movable Type. As you can imagine the answer was negative. Bryne Reese, the Product Manager of Movable Type kindly replied saying that he will consider updating one of this plugins to work with Movable Type v4.x, but that wasn't very helpful as I needed a quick turn over. I've smiled to myself and I said why not coding up my own photo gallery, especially because I've already coded a few custom photo galleries for a couple of clients during the last couple of years. (see also the portfolio for the insight.it projects such as the autoinsight.it Web site project). Yup, I've coded it and it serves the very specifications of the job. The customer needed just a Web page where they could upload and list thumbnails of images which once clicked display the full size version. For displaying the full size image I've added a nice Lightbox effect, using version Lightbox v1.0 since it's smaller than version 2.0 and we didn't need something complex for this job.

Custom Blogroll Solution

The last, but not least, more important job was setting up an easy facility for managing side group of links which on the blogoshpere are known as blogrolls. I'm very experienced at doing this since I've coded my own custom solution wayback in 2003, when Movable Type was on it's early stages. I've coded it in the best way I could have imagined and this is what the client said about it:

Dammed clever way of doing it. Thanks, it makes life a lot easier.

PRO IT Service goes blogging

2007-09-21T21:10:40Z

The day finally came in. I'm so excited to lunch my own Blog. The fact that I've coded over 200 blogs and online communities or publishing platforms, but didn't yet have my very own blog may sound funny. Well, I'm the type of person that tries to no reject a customer even if there is just a simple job or a very large project. At times the worst scenario is that I will schedule a new customer to at least a few days to one week delivery, as we are a high skilled and efficient team. Probably I have this nice behavior also because I've worked also as a Customer Support and Technical Director in the past and I'm still using those skills on my own Consultancy Business here at PRO IT Service. This blog is meant for us to share what we are doing, what nice things we discover along the way, what nice achievements we have with our work and we feel you may like to know as well as any cutting edge new media tools and technologies gems that we think are worth mentioning I'm also happy to start blogging here to keep in touch with the people that appreciate my services and it looks like they are not just a few. Actually, a few days ago I new client from New York contacted me via instant messaging from my Web site side bar saying among other things:

"You are very popular here on the US. A few people recommended me to use your services for my new Japanese Food Report Web site".

He also mentioned a few big names on the industry which make me smile and think that the long hours spent working on this niche in the last 4 years+ were more than worth Those that work on the Consultancy industry understand how nice is to see that people are appreciating what you are doing for them. The top level standards of the work we are doing, the free support offered on the Movable Type Forums as well as the Movable Type v4.0 Demo Loyalty Free Web site consecrated PRO IT Service and myself personally. Thanks for your time. I will now get back to work so happy that I've found some time for setting this blogging area :)