Six Apart News & Events: October 2006

We are delighted to announce that David Raynes has joined Apperceptive. We've admired David's work for a long time - he's written some of the plugins we find ourselves using and our clients asking for over and over. Bringing David on board lets us turn more ambitious work for our clients around faster, and also allows us all more bandwidth for our own products and projects.

You can read more about David and the rest of our team on our staff page.

Welcome David!

(Cross-posted from the Team Vox blog)

It’s been a long time in the making, but the day of the official Vox launch is here.

In anticipation for this event, we asked all of you guys to share what aspect you most appreciate or like about Vox. The answers were varied and personal (just like Vox members) but there was one aspect that really shines: the Vox community. Even though Vox is primarily focused on allowing you to share your life with the people you already know and care about – and, more importantly, care about you -- during the past months of the beta/preview real friendships have developed.

Short and sweet, everyone on Vox really rocks. And since the beginning of June when we first opened up Vox to beta testers, you all have been so welcoming. There are over 85,000 people currently on Vox who are incredibly active (which is what really matters). That’s a lot of people for a gated invite-only system that has had controlled growth. The best thing is that even with a community of that size, Vox still feels intimate and welcoming.

We’re counting on this wonderful community to help welcome all the new folks who will soon be joining Vox. We’re extremely dedicated to growing a diverse and vibrant community so this launch is just the start of Vox, not the end.

To all of you who have just joined Vox, everyone at Six Apart (the company that builds Vox) welcomes you! You’re now part of something great – something that we believe is lively, powerful and fun. The best way to learn what we’ve all been up to is by reading older posts on this blog (team.vox.com). We roll out new features and improve Vox at a very regular pace so be prepared to see improvements big and small to continue. Anyone can now join Vox instantly, but the invitation system is still the best way to invite your friends and family and get connected to them in the same step.

Thanks again to all of you who have made Vox what is is today (our members and our staff). We look forward to you all making Vox the absolute best neighborhood online.

For several months now we have been conducting bi-weekly conference calls with ProNet members (and anyone else who wants to listen in) in which we discuss a number of different topics revolving around Six Apart and professional blogging. What surprised me the most about these phone calls were the shear number of people who expressed interest in joining in - especially from Asia and Europe (Six Apart has offices in Tokyo and Paris believe it or not). But as you might imagine, trying to find a time for the call that was convenient for everyone was impossible. People then began asking if we could record the phone call so that more could participate and hear what was being discussed. And that's exactly what we did.

Continue reading 'Look! Did you hear something?'...

"Which plugins should we use?"

We hear this from enterprise clients all the time. So we put together the Plugin Pack, a collection of the some of the best and most frequently requested Movable Type plugins bundled with ten hours of installation, support, and custom development.

The Plugin Pack was developed in partnership with the plugin developers who receive a royalty from every sale, and who will work with us on incorporating new features and bug fixes.

Six Apart's plugin directory was always a great resource, but official plugin certification is a long ways off. Apperceptive set our own criteria for plugins in the pack: we selected plugins we've installed and had a good experience with, plugins that work well regardless of environment (PHP/perl, Apache/IIS, MySQL/Oracle and so on), and most importantly, plugins that customers ask for repeatedly.

The list will evolve, especially as some of the featured plugins are incorporated into Movable Type and other plugins are developed. We're very bullish on good software. People want to communicate more easily, and we want to help them provide tools to do so.

We're really pleased this is finally public. We've been talking about this idea with developers and customers alike for more than a year, and of course we want to thank Six Apart and the participating developers for all the support we've received.

Check it out at http://apperceptive.com/pluginpack.

Catching up with a few recent launches:

On October 8, for Condé Net we migrated 110 Wired blogs and photo galleries from Tripod to TypePad. The editors seem happy in their new home.

And on September 21, for Ziff Davis we helped the tech video blog DL.TV launch with a new design and a new home on Movable Type Enterprise.

There’s an extra satisfaction in doing tech work for sites that deliver expert comment on technology.

We've been fans of Adobe for a long time -- their blogging community on Movable Type is a great look inside one of the largest and most innovative software companies in the world, and of course we've worked with their teams in the past to add Movable Type and TypePad template support to tools like GoLive and Dreamweaver.

That's why it was especially exciting to see the announcement of Adobe Contribute 4. (You might remember the tool back when it was still called "Macromedia Contribute".) Contribute's a great web editor that builds on Dreamweaver's HTML publishing engine.

But unlike Dreamweaver, Contribute is designed for regular people to be able to update your website. Hey -- that sounds like blogging! Contribute is now the chocolate to your Movable Type peanut butter.

If you take a look at the feature tour on Adobe's site, there's a movie that shows the rich WYSIWYG editor you can use to easily add content to a blog. But what's more interesting is that you can drag in rich content like Office documents, videos, or audio, and Contribute will automatically do the right thing. Think about it -- if your coworkers want to put a Flash video into a blog post, or if marketing wants to turn an Word document into an update on your site, you don't have to teach them how to bring the content over; It just works.

We're glad to see Adobe embracing the open APIs around blogging, and just as happy that they're using Contribute tool to update their own blogs. Contribute works with all account levels of TypePad, as well as Movable Type and Movable Type Enterprise.

This post is the final in a series of interviews with the winners of The Style Contest. Today we're speaking with Liz Lubowitz, whose theme, The Late Show, was the overall winner in The Style Contest. Liz also won in the "Sports and Recreation" category with her homage to baseball, The Road to October.

Continue reading 'Style Contest Designer: Liz Lubowitz'...