Pages like WP. I know this can sorta kinda be done through templates already, but it's a pain in the you know what having to go to the template screen every time I want to do something page like. Instead it would be nice being able to define the template for pages at the template screen and then the ability to write pages like we're writing posts. Of course excution of MT tags in pages is a must.

First an easy one. A button next to the Authored On filed of New Post page to update the value to the current time. This is something I would use all the time since I often spend hours working on a post or even have them saved as drafts for a few days.

Next is I would like to see something like the random image text validation thing that other blogs use to combat comment spam. The new features make it easier to deal with comment spam once it has gotten into the system but what we really need are features to prevent the spam from getting into the system in the first place. There is a hack to sort of add a feature like this to MT but I can't see it as being very effective because it modifies nothing in the comment posting scripts. It seems to work on the naive assumption that comment spam is actually being entered through a browser accessing the page instead of through a bot accessing the cgi directly. Most of my commenters don't use TypeKey and I don't want to force them to do so but I am sick and tired of having to constantly remove comment spam yet I don't trust filtering like what you have implemented in the 3.2 beta.

I agree with Sara that MT really needs a better way of managing pages. Sure it's easy enough to do pages at the root of the blog, but if you need them in folders and whatnot, it takes some hacking. I know MT isn't meant to be a CMS, but it'd be very nice.

And for Twist, MT-Blacklist made by 6A's very own Jay Allen seems to do the job for me. Those random image things are annoying too.

Hmm, I can't actually think of my own request right now, but I'm sure I'll think of something.

When editing templates, a link should be shown which will bring up the original, unedited template in a new window. Possibly a link to revert to the original template. (I have often messed things up, and then can't remember how they are supposed to be done.)

A method by which the size of the edit fields for entries and templates can be enlarged or shrunk. This size would then be saved.

If one has to change web hosts, it currently seems horrendously difficult to rebuild the database at the new site: * A method by which all of the attachment which have been uploaded for entries can be downloaded to complement the current export backup of text. * A method by which all of the weblog settings (which are not in the mt.cfg) can be exported to a text file which would be readable enough to set up a duplicate web log based on the information. * A method by which templates can be exported and backed up.

Style-sheet support for a larger font size on a larger screen. I have trouble reading the default fonts at the default size, but by the time I go up two font sizes to make everything readable, the text overflows the bounds of the menu and other text starts wrapping onto other elements.

In the edit template window the "rebuild" button should indicate whether it does a Save and Rebuild or a Cancel and Rebuild.

When creating the Archive Mapping, there should some method for showing what "custom" value you have typed in will display. It would make figuring out what you wanted to use a much shorter of a cycle.

It would be nice to have comment format buttons with options such as bold, italic, underline, quote, link.. (similar to what is used on most forums) with an option to choose which comment format buttons you'd like make available on the comment form, operating at blog level.. I guess a list of options for the blog owner to select with a checkbox next to each to indicate which are to be added onto the comment form. I think it would then serve as a better alternative to using sanitize specs on mt.cfg too. Additionally, the main administrator could select which (if any) comment format options are available system-wide for individual blog authors to use if they wish, since this kind of control is now available on MT3.2.

I also think the SimpleComments plugin should be a permanent feature in MT (or at least a toggleable option).

thanks for listening :)

I'd really like to see something like Livejournal's friends only customization or even just a better way of protecting posts. Wordpress has some great post level plugins out there that I currently use. I switched to Wordpress for my main blog over this because I really believe MT, which I think it a much more powerful system, should have something like this. With the power of Typekey, what's to stop this from happening?

Entry pagination would be wonderful. I use a different tool for one weblog because the length of entries requires them to be spread over several pages. Inbuilt per-post protection options would also be a bonus. I agree it is a feature MT should have.

OpenID would be nice. :)

Spell Check! Spell Check! Spell Check! Spell Check! Spell Check! Spell Check! Spell Check! Spell Check! Spell Check! Spell Check! Spell Check! Spell Check! Spell Check! Spell Check! And with an option to right click and replace, or some other such dialog box to allow switching of misspelled word with correct word.

Hope that was not overkill.

A WYSIWYG editor for templates and posts, out of the box, like TypePad.

A "Save And Rebuild" button on template pages - Arvind's hack works great on 3.1x.

Static pages as Sara mentioned 1st comment.

Custom Fields.... I know this was talked about as a feature several years ago....please keep it in consideration!

Date-based category archives!

For example I would like my categories to each be broken down by month, i.e.: category/2005/06/index.php

:)

Lists as first-class objects, just copy exactly from Typepad.

I agree about the "Rebuild" button on the template pages. I think it should save and rebuild.

Also, changing the permalink structure from the weblog config menu would be nice.

There has got to be a way to limit where files can be uploaded. The way it is now, authors can upload files to the root of the install -- and they often forget to specify a folder path and do that inadvertently.

I usually have a "media" folder on all my installs. I'd love to be able to make that folder the "root" for file uploads. They can specify a folder structure within there, but all uploads are "sandboxed" to that folder and down.

More integration with Livejournal, such as built-in cross posting from Movable Type to Livejournal with the ability to toggle whether a post will be posted to Livejournal or not if needed. The ability to tap into Livejournal friends lists, maybe for an enhanced friends page, using Livejournal friends, TypeKey and OpenID. More ways to register for comments, so someone from Livejournal/Typekey/OpenID could type in their Livejournal/TypeKey/OpenID info to comment on a Movable Type blog.

• repagination within categories - i have hundreds of entries in some categories and they are all just one long page. categorising by month as suggested above would be good (if there was some way of backfilling old posts)

• some way of easily setting the defaults on the image upload page. i produce a thumbnail of every image i upload to 250 x 187 so it'd be nice if that popped up as the default. same for having borders round pictures

• be nice to produce bulk uploads - ie choose 4 pictures, have them all uploaded, thumbnailed and pasted in to a single entry.

• be nice to have a 'rate this post' feature as standard

• i like the idea of a 'test this template' feature where you can see what effect a template will have on the index before committing it live to the main page (perhaps to some test folder)

• some way of easily creating templates would also be great eg a page which says "heading 1 - font and size:" with a drop down menu etc.

that'll do for now. i still find MT the best for doing my 10+ photos-a-day photoblog. these things would just make it even better-er !

I'd like to see: - Better integration of Non-blog pages (c.f. Wordpress Pages Function) - Blogroll/Lists (c.f. Typelists in Typepad)

The new plugin listing is brilliant. It would be even better, though, if it could somehow indicate whether a given plugin was also installed in a PHP version and thus available for use in dynamic templates.

All I want, besides my two front teeth, a can of diet coke and some dark chocolate, is the ability to mo-pho-blog directly from my cellphone to MT.

No flickr or plugin or hack intermediary. Please, pretty please, with sugar on top. I promise to buy all of the MT coding team drinks at SXSW 2006 ...

;oD

Make Slash Forwarding URLs easy by providing the option to parse out index.html (as an example) from Movable Type generated links. Quite a few people have requested this change.

Oh, and this has been on the todo list for a while now. :)

Be able to cut and paste images without the painful image upload and building the html tags -- like how Yahoo! mail allows you to do this. We need traders and business people to post professional commentaries and they don't care to learn html and, at this point, that's becoming a stumbling block for the business community fully embracing MT! We actually have to hire high school/college interns to type in the entries for them. Painful, painful to talk tech stuff with these people. Please help.

Simple: Trackback notification emails should include a link to the "Edit Trackback" page for that trackback so they can approved/junked easily.

Expanding on what Deane said about image uploading, I'd love to see an "archive file template" for image uploads. Right now I manually put images in /images/yyyy/mm/ and I have to remember to do that for each upload. I can see where someone may want to separate images by category as well.

Expanding on what Deane said about image uploading, I'd love to see an "archive file template" for image uploads. Right now I manually put images in /images/yyyy/mm/ and I have to remember to do that for each upload. I can see where someone may want to separate images by category as well.

For the MTEntries tag, I would like to be able to combine the days attribute with other attributes like category.

Ho, Ho -- "Save and Rebuild" of the templates is in the latest nightly.

We need to be able to neuter authors even more. I have a need for authors that can do two things:

(1) Create new posts (2) Edit existing posts

And that's it. They shouldn't even see options for "Comments" and "Trackbacks." Certainly not "Plugins."

It'd be nice to abstract out the word "Weblogs" on the admin section. There are instances when this can raise questions with users. If you could move this to the config file, then it could be changed to "Sections" or "Sites" or something more innocent-sounding.

I'd like to be able to pop the "Upload File" window from the QuickPost pop-up. (I've actually hacked this up already, but it would be nice to make it "official.")

http://www.movabletype.org/support/index.php?act=ST&f=14&t=53304

Mega Dittos on the custom fields post. MT definitely needs to allow author/administrator defined fields for extra information to be included with a post.

1. Author Archives out of the box

2. Use AdminCGIPath for all plugin cgi links

3. Include a tag for AdminCGIPath (eventhough it is easy to add with a plugin).

4. Same thing for EntryBaseName

5. When an draft entry is published automatically update its created on time to the current time. (Unless the created on time has been modified.) Perhaps make this a preference.

6. Fix presave and postsave callbacks so that the third parameter actually contains the object that is going to be overwritten and not a copy of the object that contains the new values.

7. The text sent to formatting plugins is not decoded utf8. My blogs run under the UTF-8 charaterset and thus entries are encoded into UTF-8. However, the scalar passed to my formatting plugins and filters is seen by perl to be in byte mode. I have to use utf8::decode before I work with it and utf8::encode before I return it to get perl to work right with the data, e.g. match characters and not bytes in regexs.

Oh yeah,

1. Fix how plugins are called so that their lib and tmpl directories are always found. For instance, I had to modify a Blacklist install last week to include absolute paths for plugins/Blacklist/lib and plugins/Blacklist/tmpl.

Reed, check 3.2. I do believe that many of your feature requests are already included in this release.

• Integrated captcha for commenting.
• Ability to set the upload path for images to a single directory for all users.
• Upload file size limits.
• A "delete" option on each of the upload screens that appear after the file is uploaded, which would allow the user to delete the uploaded file.
• Have the funtionality of MT-Moderate for trackbacks and comments built-in and turned on by default.
• An "Add Entry-lite" interface that would allow sites to embedd a QuickPost-like screen into their exiting site design.
• Comment titles.

hmm.. can the inbuilt search also have an option to search comments as well as entries?

Another one from me but a simple one. A way to preview new entries using the individual entry archive template.

"hmm.. can the inbuilt search also have an option to search comments as well as entries?"

It's been able to do that, as far as I know (and I wrote it :-), for the last three and a half years. It's all in how you configure the form. See the SearchElement form input on here.

blush oops.. a good case of RTFM huh :) thanks!

I would like to have a post that can be made private with certain password.

the future post option in entries>post status is made me confused sometimes..I think it should be added, to be post on [what date]

another feature that will be usefull is list of draft entries, future post entries, with numbers of draft post of course :)

and uhm..an easy way to customize backend of MT ? :D

thanks :)

You should have it so that you can update the search templates right in mt.cgi. Right now to do that, I have to go to search_templates and edit them with my FTP editor.

how about theme generator? or better layout customization...even better than those what is offered in typepad..thanks :)

In the php code, MTDatabaseBase.fetch_entries should be allowed to return draft entries if args has a "status" set. In addition MTEntries should have a status option or the plugin should be ported to php and included in the MT library.

The last sentence above should read, "...or the MTDraftEntries plugin should be ported to php and include in the MT library."

Also I wish that MT would store the results of formatting entries and extended entries in new columns in mt_entry. This can improve static rebuilds and more importantly allow dynamic pages to read the cached version if the filter is not implemented in php.

I would like to see an entry field on the image screen of the "Upload File" pop-up window for adding an alternate text tag.

The current implementation is inconsistent and flawed from an accessibility standpoint. When you select the "Popup Image" option, no alt tag is generated. When you select the "Embedded Image" option, an alt tag with the file name is generated (often useless to a text-to-speech screen reader).

This generated HTML code is easy enough for an experienced user to manually edit. However, I have trained students to use MT in their classroom projects, and I have tried to show them best practices (ADA, 508, and such); but explaining to them how to manually add/change alt tags in the generated image code added a level of complication that was quite easy for them to screw up (and a few did).

I just wanted to thank you all so far for your feature requests. You'll be happy to know that most of them are already on our internal wishlist and we've added quite a few from this thread.

Keep 'em coming!

I want default templates that are pure structure. No style information at all. Something that we can wrap our own presentation markup around but still have all the MT tags in the right order.

I'm working on the template for my individual entry archive, using the new default as a guide and while I can clearly see that all "class" references are visual and I can get rid of them, some of the "ids" are presentation and some are structure (needed for links referenced in other templates). I don't want to have to be searching through the default style sheet to see which is which.

This, which never seems to get added to the pinned list of requests features in the support forums (which is why I'm repeating it here).

I'd really, really like that on import MT would respect and import the hierarchy of categories instead of just dumping it as one long list. This is specially important now we have the ability to have categories with the same name in different places (Thank you for this nice little one). It'll be a nigtmare trying to sort through several categories with the same name, trying to figure out if it's a toplevel or a sublevel and if a sublevel under which toplevel it belongs.

Dynamic pages should be output with gzip compression.

I don't know if this is a feature or a bug.

When I get a notification of a trackback ping, I want an "edit" link in the email that takes me directly to the page so I may act on it. Right now, the notification only says that the ping has been sent. You have to manually log in and navigate to the trackback listing to junk it.

I am not sure if someone has posted this feature (although I searched). Also, not sure if its included in the 3.2 version.

• When making changes in the Image-Popup templates, the results are not reflected (i.e. doenst rebuild).
• Making search templates as an integrated part of blog templates. For instance, under "Special Templates".
• For globar search (i.e. searching multiple blogs), the result page should have options to display the results from each blog in a different manner. Explained here
• Pop-up comment feature should rebuild the parent page after posting comment. I have done it using some javascript.

Sincerely,

Neil Panchal Aerospace Engineering The Georgia Institute of Technology

I'd like a callback that would allow a plugin to prevent a comment being posted and give out an error in the comment error template, an example of this error would be when you do not enter any comment text and press post.

"..prevent a comment being posted and give out an error in the comment error template, an example of this error would be when you do not enter any comment text and press post." Strange, I thought MT did that already (at least for the textbox field). ..yes, it does, I just checked..

Yes, that's what I said in my comment, and gave the textbox field as an example :) However I want that functionality to be accessible by a plugin which to my knowledge currently isn't.

Here's one thing I would like, that I hope would be fairly easy to implement for MT 3.3: the ability to automatically close comments and trackbacks after X-number of days.

We have a number of plugins for this feature, but they've either not been updated in a while (and close only comments), or rely on cron tasks to accomplish.

The simplist and most effective plugin to close comments was MTCloseComments, which allowed you to place a tag in your main index template that said 'CloseComments="X"', and, every time you rebuilt your main index template, comments on posts older than X-number of days would be closed.

For people who update their blogs at least once a day, this would effectively keep their blogs clean of comment spam without having to fiddle about with cron tasks as is the case with the (otherwise superior) Conversation Killer.

Any chance that this feature could be added at some point?

Please change the functionality of the IPBanList. The current implementation can cause unexpected problems if you try to use ranges. Below is a patch created from a hack on one of the servers I run (using version 3.17). It modifies MT::App::Comments::post.

The database also had to be modified so that ipbanlist.ipbanlist_ip was larger that 15 characters wide. (I set it to 45.) And I had to replace entries that contained '.*' with appropriate ip ranges.

--- Comments.pm.orig    Sat Aug  6 02:22:07 2005
+++ Comments.pm.new     Sat Aug  6 03:24:14 2005
@@ -203,10 +203,12 @@
         if $entry->status != RELEASE;

     require MT::IPBanList;
+    require Net::IP;
+    my $user_ip = new Net::IP($app->remote_ip);
     my $iter = MT::IPBanList->load_iter({ blog_id => $entry->blog_id });
     while (my $ban = $iter->()) {
-        my $banned_ip = $ban->ip;
-        if ($app->remote_ip =~ /$banned_ip/) {
+        my $banned_ip = new Net::IP($ban->ip) or next;
+        if ($user_ip->overlaps($banned_ip) == $Net::IP::IP_A_IN_B_OVERLAP ) {
             return $app->handle_error($app->translate(
                                       "You are not allowed to post comments."));
         }

You may want to use Net::IP::set in the loop instead of creating a new object each time.

I'd like a way to manage multiple blogs/urls easier. Maybe a config file for each domain in a /configs/ folder. Right now, the only way I know to create multiple blogs at multiple Urls is to duplicate the entire mt folder just to modify the single mt-config.cgi to get the proper url patterns for a blog.

Tj, you actually want better documentation, because a single installation of MT can already manage multiple blogs at different domains.

I like the new entry_basename but is there anyway to make it entry-basename (dashify) without using the custom function and a plugin?

Ok. I give. Where's the documentation? I've seen others use tricks on the *nix side to tell it where to find a different mt-config.cgi file.

I can't see a way around needing multiple config files with the way MT works.

ie: domain1.com domain2.com

You ~could~ run both off one installation, but all mt requests on domain2.com would use the domain1.com settings from mt-config.cgi (ie. the javascripts, the forms, search, etc.). I'd be extremely happy if we could just use relative paths and then read the domain from a server variable.

instead of http://www.domain1.com/mt/ as my cgi path - it would just be /mt/.

Tj,

I use three domains:

domain1.com is the main domain for my server and it also hosts my MT installation.

domain2.com hosts blog #1 and is a virtual host on domain1.com.

domain3.com hosts blog #2 and is a virtual host on domain1.com

If you really want to host MT on both domain2 & domain3, then you will have to do separate installions.

Yes, and thus my request for a new feature - the ability to manage multiple blogs with multiple Urls with one installation.

CGI-Path to be relative: Ie: /mt/ or /cgi-bin/mt/ instead of http://www.domain.com/mt/

And for giggles, maybe move the mail settings to the admin. That'd make me very happy. As it stands now, I have about 15 copies of the installation - all because of mt-config.cgi.

For quite some time I've wanted to see MT implement the concept of a site template -- the markup and template tags that "wrap" the content that makes each template unique.

You can unofficially implement this with template modules or creative use of a plugin[1], but I think something more straight forward and official is in order. TypePad kind of took a stab at this recently but PLEASE do not implement it the way they did[2]. Sorry but that is making it more complex then it needs to be.

[1] http://www.timaoutloud.org/archives/000311.html [2] http://help.typepad.com/tags/modules.html

Don't know if this one has been mentioned yet though it probably has.

Would be nice being able to export per category in addition to all or nothing as it is right now.

Add a way to access the default EntryBasename and the customised EntryBasename. I need to compare the two when I build the custom path.

What I want to do is to use the custom basename as the url if it's present, or to use a special filter on the title if there is no custom basename.

For example, if I have an entry titled "News about the move" with a custom basename "news-move", the url will be news-more. If I didn't have the custom basename, the url would be something like "news-about-the-move".

Thanks.

Sara, you can do this (at least up through 3.17, I haven't yet exported a single category with 3.2b4) with an index template which outputs to a text file (like "exportcat.txt"), like so:

AUTHOR: TITLE: STATUS: ALLOW COMMENTS: CONVERT BREAKS: ALLOW PINGS: PRIMARY CATEGORY: CATEGORY:

BODY:

EXTENDED BODY:

EXCERPT:

KEYWORDS:

COMMENT: AUTHOR: EMAIL: IP: URL: DATE:

PING: TITLE: URL: IP: BLOG NAME: DATE:

If fixed, finally and at long long last in the most recent beta then ignore this, but I know that 3.2b1 still didn't fix this long-standing issue:

I'd like recentlycommentedon to actually function under Postgres without my having to download a hack to the MT codebase from an a Japanese-language website.

You might want to file that as a bug, and not under feature requests.

Yeah, probably. But since it's been posted ad infinitum on the support boards for a year or more without anyone ever noticng, I thought I'd put it somewhere that it might be seen. ;)

Copy templates function.

The ability to copy the templates from another site would be nice. For example, my blog A has some heavy customizations to the style and layout. I have added features and removed some functionality. Everything is broken out into module to make the site easier to update. I'd like to be able to duplicate this sites template to blog B. Then, with a wave of the magic wand - I can easily swap out graphics and change the style.

I think multiblog may do that for you.. check it out anyway :)

I would like so see a template system for new entries. This would make it much easier to publish articles with a defined structure like recipes (ingredients, preparation, source, links, etc.). With MT 6.1x I use plain/text files which I copy'n'paste into the new article first.

This would be also very good in combination with a new entry based on an uploaded image. This can be done by using placeholder of the image inside of the template like .

Donna,

Thanks for the tip about using an index template for exports. Did a little playing tonight with my old non-beta install and it's going to be dead easy for me to move stuff over when 3.2 goes golden. :)

MTIfStatic and IfDynamic tags working more as expected when they are used to build templates with non-dynamic plugin tags.

For instance: <MTIfStatic><MTDaylightOrStandard></MTIfStatic>

This should simply fail silently on a dynamic page; as it is now, the page can't even be built because the DaylightOrStandard causes an "unrecognized tag" error.

Built in email notification of new comments. This feature rocks on EE and really helps keep a comment thread lively.

Here is another one that should be easy: an Other section in the templates area. Right now I have a number of extra templates for non-blog pages (stuff like a profile page, and my MT powered gallery hack, and various other scripts and odd stuff) that are cluttering up the Index Template section. It would make everything a bit easier and really clean up the listing (as it is now in the 3.2 beta I still have to scroll down to see all the index templates on a 1280x1024 monitor with the browser window maximized).

Also I would like to see some kind of conditional post editing links that only show up for people who are capable of editing post like on Blogger.

Also some kind of statistics tracking thing built into MT would be nice. Something simple to enable and with enough conditional MT tag support to make it as flexible as everything else is. And taking it a step further so that it can even track RSS/Atom viewing statistics would really rock.

And I will second or third or fifteenth the above one for custom fields. Even just the ability to access just a single custom field would be very nice (yeah I know there are plug-ins for this but built-in is always better).

I don't know if this has been added in MT 3.2 but if it hasn't it would be really nice to be have an mt.setPostStatus method in the XML-RPC API. I think the method name should be sufficient enough of a description on this one.

Lastly this isn't something I am big on but I know numerous people who have chosen WordPress over MT just because WordPress has support for podcasting built-in. Might be something you want to look into (unless this whole podcasting thing just turns out to be a fad, which it basically is IMHO).

An easier way to manage static pages than adding them as index templates. Maybe a static pages category that does not get included in any of the standard indexes, so it doesn't get into the way, but you can still easily add static content as posts and then refer to it from other templates by their URL.

Threaded comments. Everywhere. Threaded this and threaded that. It's so hard to keep track of who's replying to who without the painfully visible sight of "Regarding your comment [name]" or some other type of text indicator 14 rows down.

The mod that is currently on the Professional Network is ok, but takes quite a bit of time to do, and it requires unsupported modification to database tables and isn't exactly "user friendly."

--

Open ID and LiveJournal logins! One of your people has it already, but that also requires some hacking and plugins and doesn't exactly work correctly when you see it under the Commenter section.

--

That's my two requests pleas. Keep up the excellent work, guys! 3.2 is amazing!

Ok, I lied, there's another thing, lol.

For the Entry/Archive tag, you have "category."

For instance, include only category="general"

However, if say, one wanted to exclude one category, for instance, "private" or "politics" and they had like 12 other categories like I do, I'd have to list every category in that category property except the one I'd like to exclude.

Therefore, I propose the following: exclude

"Exclude" would work the same way as "category," with the exception of doing the exact opposite. Booleans would work in this one as well.

So, say, for instance, people had the option to subscribe to two feeds. One with political views, and one without them, a more sanitized feed with everything other than politics, if you will.

That's about it, so that, in addition to my previous suggestions, and I think I'm all set.

Thanks again for this excellent release, and I can't wait for the next one!

Ok ok, one more suggestion.

Default categories for entries, such as "General." This helps avoid a (null) category of "none" which would prevent normal entries from appearing on generic category.

From the ProNet list:

One more feature which would be very handy: Is there a possibility to have "entry templates" or "entry presets"?! So it would be nice to have let's say a dropdown on the "new entry" screen, which lists entry presets. Clicking on one of them would insert predefined text into the entry body, entry more etc. This way, one can easily add entries with the same formatting (and enhance for example the keyvalues-plugin, 'cause sometimes it is hard to remember which keyvalues were used).

Another thing (i think a little BigPAPI would do it) is to have an "duplicate entry" option in the "entry listing" page (action menu). I think this action menu is VERY powerful and can solve little problems in little time :-D

i vote for custom fields as well, but most importantly, I would like the custom fields to be sortable (i.e. using sort_by in the MTEntries template tag), import/exportable and all of that good stuff.

How about some SpamLookup documentation.

As we said earlier we're working on improving all of the Movable Type documentation including that of plugins like SpamLookup. We've made serious gains in the last few weeks and will continue to.

In the meantime, you may be aided by this excellent tutorial on Learning Movable Type.

Thanks for the poke. We're working on it all.

The fields to support "About" page templates for each author. Have tags/fields that correspond to author description, author phone, author URL, author email, author photo.

This way, I can avoid using a plugin for this (I find most plug-ins don't work on my Windows installation), and I don't have to create a new template with hard-coded descriptions for each author.