Powerful plugin management

The hundreds of plugins available for Movable Type are what define its power and flexibility for a lot of users, and we've tried to do justice to the creativity and innovation of our plugin developers in version 3.2.

Movable Type's plugin architecture dates back three years to version 2.2. In that version, we added the ability to create custom template tags, and version 2.6 built on that framework by adding custom text formatting plugins and the ability to store data for use by plugins.

In version 3.0, we radically revamped the plugin architecture to support the creation of full applications on top of the Movable Type platform. And version 3.1 extended this power with application-level callbacks that brought on a number of truly professional-grade plugins.

What's New for Plugins in Movable Type 3.2?

Now that we've got a rich and mature base of plugins taking advantage of the new platform's potential, we've focused on making them accessible and manageable for all the users on a system. To that end, there are a few new areas that make plugins an even more integrated part of the application.

First, the system overview section we've mentioned earlier has a section specifically for configuring system plugins, including the ability to enable or disable any individual plugin or all of them at once.

As always, plugins designed for version 3.0D or higher have the ability to display the name of the plugin's author and a link to documentation for the plugin. But now all plugins, even those designed for 2.x versions of Movable Type, can also display a list of which template tags, tag attributes, and text filters the plugin makes available.

In addition, plugin developers don't have to create an entire application user interface just to let users configure settings; Individual settings for plugins can be displayed inline on a single page.

Per-Blog Plugin Settings

In addition to all the new functionality around managing plugins, it's now possible to expose blog-level settings on any plugin. Each of the blogs in a large installation can customize the settings they use for the plugin, and Movable Type automatically stores the appropriate settings that are specific to each weblog.

Whether you're tweaking plugin settings for a specific blog, enabling a plugin application across your entire installation, or just reviewing your system's plugins using the new management interface, Movable Type 3.2 will make plugins easier to configure, use, and manage.

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