revjim.net

Is it just me, or am I the only one not excited about MovableType's 2.5 release? I installed it on revjim.net, mostly to get the integrated search capabilities.

Ben and Mena certainly deserve praise for their hard work. Regardless of what anyone says, good or bad about it, it certainly has swept the blogging world off its feet. But in my opinion, it seems that perhaps 2.5 was rushed out the door in order to release something on MT's 1st birthday, as opposed to waiting until the release was worthy.

MT 2.5 includes default template changes that incorporate Mark Pilgrim's website recommendations from his online book, Dive Into Accessibility. This is a good thing as new users will most likely tweak the default templates and therefore slowly make the web more accessible as a whole. But, for those of us who are upgrading, this means nothing, as, those of us who are willing to follow Mark's guidelines in their site design will do so, and those who aren't certainly aren't going to throw away their MT templates to use the new defaults.

MT 2.5 includes the code from the MT-Search plugin that many MT users installed. This seems like a good change. Search capability is a good thing, and having this embedded in the code only makes MT more featureful. MT-Search before now, was merely a hack. The templates didn't integrate into the MT User Interface, the configuration settings were in a separate file. It really wasn't a plugin at all, but merely a whole new script that used the MT API. I was excited when I heard it would be included in the next version of MovableType because I wanted it to be tied into MT better. However, it seems Ben and Mena just threw it in there at the last second. The templates do NOT live inside the MT User Interface. The search capability is not tightly integrated. The only real difference is that the configuration is now done in the main MT configuration file, and not in its own. Big deal.

Trackback auto-discovery has been implemented. This is a good thing. And it seems to be done correctly. I haven't had a chance to use it yet, as many MT installs, like mine, don't enable Trackback.

The ability to ping blo.gs, as well as any other weblogs.com compatible XML-RPC ping accepting server. This is a good change, and one that I had hacked into my old version of MT.

The keywords/metadata field was added. This is a nice addition for making a users MT install more searchable, but not really something to jump up and down about. If the keywords aren't found somewhere in the entry text, they probably aren't valid keywords anyway. Search engines started realizing this a few years ago and began ignoring keywords all together. I doubt many users are going to get tons of extra functionality out of this.

Localization is good. But it means close to nothing to the existing userbase.

The release isn't spectacular, but it does have some good points. Maybe I'm just really pissed off about the Search templates not being embedded in the UI like everything else is. Maybe I was just really hoping for comment reply notification and threaded comment views.

All in all, if you're using MT already and you have MT-Search installed, the upgrade isn't worth the effort. If you're a new user, there certainly isn't anything wrong with it that should cause you to scour the Internet looking for an older version.