Activity Log improvements

Perhaps one of the most underappreciated bits of functionality in past versions of Movable Type is the Activity Log. For years, all common actions that take place in a Movable Type installation have been logged, providing administrators with a view of lots of key information:

• Successful logins and incorrect login attempts
• Creation, updating or deletion of weblogs and entries, and deletion of comments and TrackBacks
• Detailed errors generated from plugins
• Search terms entered into Movable Type's integrated search engine (great for knowing your audience is having trouble finding)

But we've left all that alone in version 3.2 of Movable Type and made no improvements. Just kidding! There's tons of cool new features in the Activity Log that will simplify management of your blogs, help administrators tweak the system, and provide an even more detailed record of exactly how your system is running.

Blog-Level Activity

First, many things traditionally logged in the activity log are blog-specific (e.g. new entry creation). Now, we've surfaced the blog-context in the form of a blog activity log. That means it's easy to click from a particular blog to a view of just the actions that have taken place on that blog, perfect for focusing on a particular blog's performance or activity. Of course, administrators can easily view all the activity for all blogs, just like always.

And the system-wide search that's woven throughout Movable Type 3.2 now works on the Activity Log. If you're having trouble with a plugin, want to track down a subtle behavior on your system, or just want to see all the things a particular user has been doing, it's an invaluable addition. Even better, you can limit search to a particular date range to narrow down the log to just the most relevant items.

A couple of our longest-standing annoyances with the Activity Log has been resolved as well: You can now control the number of log items displayed on a page, navigate through log items a page at a time, and easily reset the log without having to wait for dozens of log entries to display. If you're upgrading from an older version of Movable Type, you'll know exactly how convenient these improvements are.

You Can Take It With You

These new features are useful, but our business users, in particular, have told us they need to get this kind of important system information out into their other applications for use in reporting, status updates, and other business process documentation. It's finally easy to get your valuable Activity Log data out of Movable Type, as we've added a simple CSV-formatted export to the log page.

Whether you're just backing up your log for peace of mind before resetting it, or if you're opening the CSV data directly into a spreadsheet application to analyze search trends on your blog, Movable Type 3.2 can provide the data you need. This extremely simple export format is already promising to turn the Activity Log from a useful record into an essential management interface for business blogging.

In all, Movable Type's Activity Log has always been a unique strength, and we think with the new updates in this version, you'll find that it's a must-have reference for keeping the platform running at peak performance.

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