From MovableType

Contents 1 Planned Agenda 2 Topics For Next Time 3 Recording 4 Minutes 4.1 MT 4.2 Update 4.2 Security Vulnerability 4.3 Fireball 4.4 Greyhound Planning 4.5 Template Set Change Detection and Diffing 4.6 Making the Case to Clients

Planned Agenda

• MT 4.2 Update
• Security Vulnerability
• Fireball Branch
• Greyhound Planning
• Refresh blog templates enhancements
• Making the case to client to upgrade to 4.2

Topics For Next Time

• Improving Transparency
• The process of deprecation
  • IP Banning
  • Template Tags
  • Timelines
  • Notifications

Recording

• Podcast

Minutes

MT 4.2 Update

• We hope to have RC3 released today (Jun 25) or tomorrow.
• When RC3 is released we will also make available for the first time a free public beta of the Movable Type Community Solution.
• The release date of MT 4.2 has been extended to allow for it to bake longer in the wild, and for us to focus on making this release one of the highest quality releases of MT4 we have seen. A release date of late July is planned.

Security Vulnerability

Please read the mt.org blog post about the security vulnerability we addressed last week.

Fireball

We are working on expanding even further MT's scalability potential. Fireball will be a special branch setup in subversion that will contain low level enhancements to MT's DB layer. It will ultimately be released in Greyhound, the next official release of MT. In the meantime, the DB stuff will be isolated in its own branch to make taking advantage of those features easier.

DB Features Planned

• Separate Database Connection handles for read and read/writes. This is advantageous because writes to a DB can often lock the DB and prevent reads, and since most of the queries on a DB are read-only, this can result in poor performance.

Greyhound Planning

Greyhound is the codename for the next release of MT. It is our intention to dramatically increase the transparency of MT's development.

Template Set Change Detection and Diffing

Dave shared with us an idea and concern around making it easier to update his templates. His specific feedback had to do with being able to preview what changes would be made to a template when I refreshed (without actually refreshing it). Also Dave wanted a way to lock a template and say, "do not refresh this template."

It seems like another good solution would be some way to merge changes between your templates and the new templates you want to install...

• Wants to flag something as "this is something I am customizing"
• Merging changes in

Making the Case to Clients

There was a great conversation difficult to summarize, but we talked about how does a consultant go about making the case to a client that it is worth re-architecting their old MT3 site to take advantage of MT4's many many features.

With clients at the end of the day: money talks. Often the best strategy will be appealing to their budget, either by:

• demonstrating how the changes will lower their total cost of ownership over time
• demonstrating that the changes will actually be cheaper than staying with what they have