Movable Type 6 Ideas

I'd love good default templates in HTML5 and responsive (I don't know what's behind "web 2.0").

I'd also love to see easier customization of the general interface for branding (e.g. an easier way to change the logo would be a start, without having to modify template code).
Visitors profile pages can be achieved using the Community features (granted, it's not free).

I'd like a better logic in sites/blogs templates — specifically a russian dolls model for templates: look for them in the blog, then the parent site, then global templates in that order.

An export/import mechanism that does export/import everything and not just a subset of a site's data. And that works with huge files.

Active support (and proper documentation) for running MT under FastCGI, with Nginx or whatever solution is faster and less memory-hungry than basic CGI under Apache.

Up-to-date documentation and plugins directory.

@Caio:

Can you explain what you mean by "better comment system"? What does the current one misses?

A search engine is dynamic by essence, so what do you mean by "doesn't go into my cgi-bin directory"? If that's just a matter of prettifying the URL, you can do that using rewrites on your web server. What's good about MT is that it has clear separation with the web server, but as soon as you start wanting more and more "point and click" automatisms, you lose on flexibility and choices (e.g. the dynamic publishing mechanism assumes that you have Apache as web server, it won't work out of the box with Nginx).

basically, the current comment system misses a wysiwyg editor. That being said, almost no one else has one and it might put movable a little more up a head. Also, they should polish it (visually) a little more, a new user might think it is garbage and head for disqus or livefyre. And don't forget point and click custimization. I guess it is a pretty simple fix, but it will be better if they included it in the core than having us code it.

How do I pretify a url?

François: you might want to look at the recent development of the MT::PSGI module.
(Was it released with 5.14? or only in develop right now? don't remember)
It will help connecting MT to other web servers.

@Ciao: that epitomizes the difference between Movable Type and something like WordPress. What you describe (rich text in comments, look & feel etc.) is perfectly feasible with MT, which lets you do pretty much anything you want, with the consequence that there is more to do yourself. And that's what I like about MT, it doesn't assume what I want to do and gives me a great deal of freedom doing so. Once you start going down the road of "point and click" for everything, you lower or eliminate the learning curve for every body but you reduce that flexibility for the technically inclined.

Prettifying URLs in Apache can be done with something like this (provided you can manage your web server settings, and that your MT script lives at /cgi-bin/mt/):

RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^/search/(.*)$ /cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi?search=$1&limit=100 [L,PT] RewriteRule ^/tag/(.*)$ /cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi?tag=$1&limit=100 [L,PT]

That would enable prettier URLs like so:
- yoursite.com/search/keyword for a search, or
- yoursite.com/tag/sometag for a tag

@Shmuel: I've seen it and I'm really looking forward using it. But what I'm saying is that it needs to be documented and supported (as in technical support), not just possible. For example, I've asked numerous times on the dev-list for people to document their FastCGI settings, and as far as I remember, no one has.

I would be happy if:

-The navigation system will be improved. The current main navigation forces too many mouse-clicks for a user in order to perform routine tasks, or navigate to specific sections. IMO the dropdown navigation in MT4 where you hover your mouse over a main menu and you see all the options works much better. I have nothing against a main side navigation, but I think MT5 can follow the improvements Wordpress has done to their system by allowing a mouse-over action to cause a fly-out menu to appear, instead of having to click a main item to see what is under it.

-I would like to see better documentation for plugins, and tracking of plugins. There are numerous plugins, but one never knows whether it really works in the latest version of Movable Type except through trial and error.

-I second you on a better export and import module, especially the ability to import or export custom fields, in addition to, but not in place of the backup and restore option.

-Compared to previous versions, MT5 seems to suffer from some performance issues. I know run it under FastCGI plus Memcached, and that makes a big difference, but I think there should be room for more improvement elsewhere.

I second everything Avner and Serdar Yegulalp said.

Why don't you all file a "feature request" for each of the features that you've mentioned above?

You could do that from:
http://bugs.movabletype.org/

Kind Regards,
Mihai Bocsaru

----------------------------------
Daily Movable Type Consultant

Web Development
Movable Type Consulting
Six Apart Partner

http://www.pro-it-service.com/
----------------------------------

Movable Type Demo
http://www.movabletypedemo.org/

Mihai: I think that it is very good to discuss features in the forums, and for various people to add opinion.
Well, the planning of MT6 is still a long way off, but I have forward this thread to the rest of the MT team.

@Mihai I also like live discussions instead of a boring old tickets

Discussions are good and this is one place. Formal FR properly detailed (with use case) on the system that developers use to prioritize things is good too. They're both useful, and different.

Serdar:
About communication with the team in Japan, I am from the team in Japan. And I'm here and on the mailing lists MTOS and ProNet.
I'm not nearly as good as the Mihai and Francios in installation problems, but when it comes to writing plugins and themes I can help.

About the WYSIWYG editor... well this is an open question. Until today nothing really good was created, and users will always want MS-word compatible editor.
The best is Google-doc's editor, and it is propriety, and still not as good as Word.
So from time to time we update our editor to the state-of-art. that is all we can do.

Implementing a WYSIWYG editor in the comment form like TinyMCE or Redactor, or something more simple like markItUp!, is actually pretty easy. Setting it up takes extra time, but I like having the option to decide whether to have it or not, and which editor, if I do.

I would like to see in future versions:

A built-in reporting/flagging system for comments. MT works rather well as a forum (this site is proof of it, in my opinion), but it lacks some essential moderating tools.

Front-end editing of comments for administrators/moderators.

Pretty URLs option for searches, tags and user profiles. I know you can achieve this yourself with server rewrites, but I've personally run into difficulties and so have other people when you look around the forum for this particular issue.

Pretty please create an “Upload from web” option to upload new assets. I don't want to hotlink files from other sites and display them on my posts and anything. And having to download them to my PC and re-uploading them again is a tiresome task.
Is this possible?

I think this topic is very useful for me personally, and how to send pictures on this theme, thanks admin