The Final Stretch

We're getting pretty close to the final release version of Movable Type 3.2. Last night Jay and the rest of the team released MT 3.2 Beta 4 and they've been actively working on any remaining issues. Before they become incredibly busy getting the final release out, I wanted to take a moment during this break of sorts and congratulate the team on what they've accomplished with 3.2.

Movable Type 3.2 is a remarkable release. There's a fit and finish in the product that's really noticeable. I've always thought one of Movable Type strengths was its polish. In actuality, the new release really brings this polish to a new level.

Honestly, other than writing posts for Mena's Corner, I don't have the opportunity to use Movable Type as much as I should. This changed, however, after I decided to do some tweaks to the way that TrackBacks are displayed on Mena's Corner. Basically, I wanted to clean up the individual archive pages a bit and tweak the styles. Almost immediately I noticed that things in the interface just made more sense -- and this is coming from the person who made the original interface. Many of the sort of nagging little issues that I just learned to deal with were suddenly gone and in their place were options that just made sense.

One thing that made me leave my office and go hunt down Jay and the team to tell them how excited I was about the release was the new ability to change the order of your weblogs in the admin interface. When you're managing twenty weblogs in your account, some of them retired, this new features is a lifesaver.

Oh, and there is global search and replace! Since I didn't build out the new corporate site, I wasn't exactly sure where one specific css file was located. So I did a global search for the "corner" style and MT searched all of my templates within all of the weblogs and came up with the relevant results.

As with Ben's post about writing a plugin for Movable Type 3.2, I share his awe in how much the platform has matured. To be able to have the distance and see Movable Type as users rather than developers is an amazing thing -- something that I never imagined we'd have the ability to do. This allows me to write a gushing post about the release and not feel like I'm bragging about my kid just because she's my kid.

I think people are going to be really pleased with this release.