Outbound TrackBack Control

We've seen a huge increase in the number of companies using blogs within their organization, on an intranet or extranet to help their employees connect and communicate about projects. And one of the first requirements of project blogging is to know that the communications around the blog will be secure by default.

For application-level security, we of course recommend following best practices for your server environment and firewall. But what about TrackBack, which is designed for sharing information about links? In Movable Type 3.2, we've made sure you have total control over who you're sending TrackBacks to by introducing outbound TrackBack control.

With this new set of options, available as part of the new system overview section of the application, a system administrator can choose where TrackBacks are sent.

Want to make sure that sites outside your company don't know what you're linking to? You can safely limit TrackBacks to just your installation. If you're interested in letting other sites know about TrackBacks you've sent, you can even provide a list of domains that are acceptable for sending. And we've finally made it easy to send TrackBacks between blogs on a single installation of Movable Type, so you can constrain TrackBacks to just your own sites just by selecting that option.

And all these new controls for TrackBack are enabled on sites that have auto-discovery enabled, as well. This means that you can even set Movable Type to automatically ping sites that are TrackBack enabled, but the application will still honor the system settings you've defined.

[This is part eighteen in a series called "Our 32 Favorite Features of Movable Type 3.2".]