MovableType 3.1

Sweet, perhaps blogging won’t suck for much longer. Looks like MovableType is working on some stuff.

Some things l think are pretty interesting:

Dynamic PHP publishing, controllable on a per-template basis: You can control whether you publish a dynamic or static page on a per-template basis, letting you balance the publishing and traffic for your weblog. For example, high-demand documents like XML syndication files can be static, for maximum speed and lower server load, and individual post archives can be dynamic, eliminating the need to rebuild pages when making a global template change.

Now being a PHP developer, this sounds pretty good. But I’m curious about performance. I personally prefer static pages whenever possible. But I wouldn’t mind having some PHP in there.

Subcategories: A new category management interface gives you fine-grained control over the organization and display of your posts. You can even easily move a subcategory from one parent category to another.

Where have you been for so long?

Then of course this plugin pack:

• MT-Blacklist: a comprehensive spam-blocking and management system for comments and TrackBacks, with an advanced interface and remote importing of blacklist entries.

My prayers are answered.

• XSearch/Plus: A system which allows you to plug in alternate search engines for Movable Type. This includes a working implementation of a powerful Plucene-based search engine.

Very cool, but again I question performance and server load.

• KoalaRainbow: A visualization engine for Movable Type which uses its own query language to generate graphics based on arbitrary queries of data in your Movable Type system.

Cool. Personally I would vastly prefer out-of-the-box Gallery integration.

• Markdown: A simple text markup language which allows you to create posts in plain text and have them display in semantically correct valid XHTML.

People who know me, know I love HTML, and find it geeky to play with. But I wouldn’t mind seeing what this is about. From looking at the webpage, it really kicks butt. So I would love to take a spin. And considering it’s GPL, I might just use that elsewhere.

On a little tangent, that would be pretty spiffy for bugzilla.

• Notifier: An email notification system which lets your readers subscribe to be notified whenever an individual post, a category, or even an entire weblog is updated. There’s also a complete system for managing subscriptions.

Would anyone go for this if I set it up?