The Movable Type Hackathon and Summit

A few weeks ago, many of us on the Movable Type team got to meet with many of our most prominent members of the ProNet community, as well as a number of Movable Type users. The occasion was a two-day event, starting first with a Hackathon for MT plugin developers and geeks, followed by a more structured full-day Executive Summit, where the community discussed everything from best practices for a business blog to large-scale architecture issues to editorial concerns and even the future of the Movable Type platform.

For those of us at Six Apart, the events in New York City were exciting and energizing: Looking at some of the community writeups of the hackathon gives a great feel for the day; There were tons of plugins and little hacks created, but more importantly, there was the chance for many members of the community to meet each other face-to-face. (For some of us, we were putting faces to names we’d seen online for six or seven years!)

Plus, Dan brought cookies!

The Executive Summit the next day featured a full day’s worth of presentations, starting with Jay Allen outlining “how to build a plugin” first thing in the morning and lasting until Michael Sippey’s look at the enormous amount of energy and effort being put into the next major update to the Movable Type platform. In between, we heard lessons from experts like Adam Tinworth of RBI, David Jacobs of Apperceptive, and Matt Jaeger of Advance Internet. Though the videos are a bit rough, Maarten Schenk on our team, whom you might also know from Blogologie, has posted some low-res recordings of many of the day’s presentations.

We’re extremely grateful to all of you who took the time to travel to the events, from all around the country and even from around the world. There’s simply nothing as inspiring as seeing what amazing and unexpected things our community can create with the tools that we help build, and it’s a great motivator for the significant milestones we’re achieving with Movable Type in the next few weeks and months.

(Thanks to Elise Bauer and Dan Wolfgang for the photos.)