Woo! Thank you Six Apart for the incredible dedication we've seen with this release. If every release is going to be like this, its going to be simply staggering.

The only one mini-complaint I had with this beta test is that the bug tracking, for me at least, was awkward. I don't receive notifications of what's happening with my bug or any way to follow up or any way to see if others are experiencing the same bug. Kevin Shay had suggested some sort of public page with "resolved" bugs, that would be useful as well as a bounce back of "Your bug has been received" to which we could reply to add follow ups.

The best thing I loved was the public beta-ness, I hated the private betas where we couldn't really talk freely about the software or stuff we were developing on the software.

Arvind beat me to it. I know you explained why it wasn't feasible somewhere, Jay, but what I'd really like is public, read-only access to your internal bug database. You guys were so busy that I felt like I was bugging (ugh) you when I reported a bug since I was never sure if it had already been reported but not added to the "known bugs" list.

I have loved the public beta and the openess of the process.

I'd like to see the User-to-User beta test support moved to a temp beta section of the forum. It was hard to follow what was going on without threaded comments.

I second Sara, also. But one thing I loved loved loved about the "user-to-user" support thread was that Jay and some other developers answered 99% of the questions.

More of a ditto to the above really. Spmething like Trac or Bugzilla would have been indispensible for filing and checking the status of bugs. I'm not complaining, honest, but I filed a problem I have to the user-to-user comments the other day, and whether I was low on the totem of possible bugs or just got lost in the plethora of posts, I have a problem which is probably not significant to final release, but I/we won't know until tomorrow. Six Apart (and Jay in particular) is to be congratulated on extremely hard work, and I think more importantly, opening the beta process to the world. With so many different potential configurations to support, it makes them positively amazing. Kudos guys.

Never been a big fan of Bugzilla but it would have been nice to have a few areas for the beta in the forums and read-only access to the internal bug database or at least the resolved bugs part of it. One category for bugs and another for user-to-user trouble shooting would have been nice in the forums. Trying to do this stuff through comments wasn't a very good method of doing it.

I'm very glad to hear planning for launch MT3.2 - my website next version will be powered by MT3.2

Do you planning to continued localization l10n project of MovableType 3.2 ?

Just want to thank again the 6A. It was a great experience being part of the user-to-user beta testing. Not to mention the memories that it brought back when most of the support for MT 1.x was in the forums =)

Anyways, I like 3.2 so much...I'm converting my 2.661 to it. Good times!

I felt much the same about reporting bugs. They just disappeared and we're not really sure for a few more hours whether or not they got fixed.

One thing I loved is the fact that you held back the release until it was good and ready. That philosophy is what makes Movable Type and Six Apart great, and I'm praying that's what keeps it great. As a beta tester it implied that what I was doing (beta testing) really mattered and that 6A genuinely wanted to get it right.

Keep up the good work, Jay. If I were a manager at 6A, I'd probably give you a raise.

Since you asked, I have a couple of tiny quibbles. ("Tiny Quibbles"—wasn't that a hit in the 70s?)

1) The comment feed for this blog should display more than 15 items. Especially over the past week or so, there have often been many more than 15 comments posted between the times I've refreshed the feed.

2) The comment feed seems to be in forward chronological order, not reverse like most other feeds. That may have been deliberate, but I find it confusing.

3) Diffs for each new beta?

But overall, the whole process has been managed brilliantly. It's been the polar opposite of the 3.0 episode in terms of transparency and communication (and the amount of cool new user-facing features in the release). Congratulations, and thanks!

I want to add to what most are saying here. I didn't have a problem with the emails I sent to mtbugs@sixapart.com Sometimes I knew they were handled and sometimes I just had to assume they were. The problem was in this blog. In the beginning, posting to the "user to user" thread was fine, but as the test went on each time I had an issue I had to scan through a long list to see if it was something mentioned before.

Maybe a separate "user to user" comment thread for each beta release? A way of searching the information easily?

Jay, this is a quibble. You did a fantastic job.

Well, this has been the smoothest of the smooth beta tests I've ever been involved with - everything has just worked. I love the updated interface, and I'm really excited about the new template designs and heck, the new template stuff in general. Love the anti-spam system too. This really is going to knock the pants (and any other undergarmets) off the competitors.

I would have to concurr about some sort of a bug tracking system. We use a simple tracking system created in-house for use by programmers at my workplace. And I've used Bugzilla to keep track of bugs for Firefox and Thunderbird, especially to keep tabs on what is being done for the Mac versions.

six apart time = gmt minus what ?

The 3.2 Beta cycle has been awesome. In all honesty, even with the very minor issues that I came across - it was probably as stable or even more so than most commercial software these days. Good job and thanks for letting us be a part of it.

I do have to agree with the bug tracking. It would be nice to see status of bugs (and maybe features too).

First - of all, thanx to all the 6A people who worked so hard on this new release. I agree with some of the earlier comments that a threaded system for tracking bugs, and even user-to-user support would ahve been a little easier to use.

Thanx also for getting the new version right before relasing the final version - even though to some it seemed like five beta versions were alot (it isn't), it's much more important to have a solid product out of the gate so that it's easy and relatively frustration-free for the everyday user.

Very much agreed on a bug tracking system. I used to manage 'defect tracking' for Cisco, and we lived and died by the quality of our bug reporting system. Something that's easy to use and search would be a huge benefit.

Second, the user-to-user thread should have been a forum, not a comment thread. There are a billion choices out there for good forum/bb systems, and that would have been a perfect application. It feels like comments are lost in the wash now that that comment list is really long.

But overall, guys, rock on. This has been incredibly professional and I remain a huge fan of Movable Type.

WOOT MC Jay & Co., most excellent! ...it's what, 8:30am there now? I'm refreshing the screen like a speed fiend with a bad twitch :-)

Jay, I'm a prod manager myself and I run our prod dev effort using the Bugzilla/Movable Type combine and its a dream!

It really makes for agile development. I use Bugzilla for structured bug tracking and use MT for the unstructured stuff (e.g. FAQ, Architecture discussions, Minutes of the Meeting, etc).

I then have RSS feeds into the custom Bugzilla homepage to tie the two together.

If you want to push MT into the enterprise, you may want to consider creating an MT Plugin for Bugzilla.

One great thing about Bugzilla is its autolinkification mechanism where it linkifies text automagically (e.g. "bug 123" becomes a link to bug123; "attachment 5" links to that attachment; when a bug is closed, the link is displayed with a strikethru but is still clickable, etc.)

It would be great if I can associate a blog with a bugzilla and it will also automatically linkify MT comments and postings.

One minor suggestion about documentation:

I think it might have been better to get more of the documentation done before releasing the betas (or after beta 1 or beta 2). It's great that you were concentrating on the technology, but I feel like the documentation could have been done at the same time instead of being put off till later. There are many places where it simply needed to be copied and pasted from the old documentation (and maybe changed slightly). It would have been nice to have that done earlier.

I think you guys should move to the east coast. That would help eliminate this whole waiting thing for me!

oh man ! i'm dying here

We're GMT minus 9 here. I still run on east coast time myself, so don't worry, it drives me nuts too! :)

I agree with thenestor except that there were "many places where it simply needed to be copied and pasted from the old documentation (and maybe changed slightly)." That would have been nice, but not realistic given their state.

GMT minus 9 ... you've moved to Alaska! :-)

hmm.. guess one of those unforseen difficulties Jay mentioned reared its ugly head.. :(

BTW, with my latest fresh install I used a different root directory name in my cgi-bin for the MT install and was getting almost no comment spam as a result [presumably] (although plenty of trackback spam). I had not entered a new entry for about a week, until earlier today. As soon as I did a new entry, it pinged the recently updated list at the MT main site, and within a few minutes I was getting slammed by comment spam, which has not stopped since.

If you're not already doing it, can you try in some way obfuscating those recently updated weblog links from the MT home page? It seems spammers are using that as a source.. it may not help, but worth a try. Anything to annoy the spammers :)

cheers.

Login to your account and you can download it now.

Awesome, they must've just posted it :)

Everyone should check their typekey account if they paid for a license. I'm currently downloading a file named "MT-3.2.tar.gz."

:)

Yeah, it's on the main page of the site for everyone, paid or not.

Should I remove my link to this site - will the beta URL continue to function now that 3.2 is out?

Hmm, I should hit refresh before posting. For some reason my proxy caches this site aggresively.