I was speaking to the new conscriptvolunteer last night about how we were going to move the Wheelock Heath Baptist church website forward. The main criteria is easily updatable. The site needs to be updated by someone with little or no html experience and needs to be quickly updated so we don’t get stale content.
I remembered reading in my feeds that this had been done, so I just had to find out where. Redland Baptist is the end result with a very interesting page with HOWTO links at Heal Your Church Web Site: Beyond the Blog and other links on making MovableType a Content Managment System. Now I just need to check that the web host for the church website includes MT compatability – PHP and Mysql (its a IIS based server)

I also came across the pretty cool Milonic menu system that looks like a very versatile and adaptable system.

Other links I need to note are also at Beyond the blog, Redux, Part Deux

Just tried to post a comment on Iconoblog and realised that the system asks for the captcha code but doesn’t display it. Doesn’t do it on Kristen’s either….That and if you use internet explorer then the comment page seems to be missing text until you scroll down and back up again and it all re-appears…. (i’m sure i’ve had that and fixed it in the past though)

MT-Blacklist v1.64 released and updated on here. Its a one line change to fix a potential major spam hole.

As the several million other MT users have already blogged, MT3 was announced a day or so ago. I tried to read the site but it was being swamped so I only got to see it this evening. Everyone seems to be complaining about the cost of running a blog with more than one author or more than 3 blogs (I have 6 blogs with 3 authors). Interestingly, Mena’s justification for the pricing system contains the text

Based on surveys and user feedback, we are fairly comfortable these licenses will meet the needs of over 85% percent of our current users

I’m not sure which survey or which 85% of users they talked too as it certainly doesn’t look like they talked to the major users.
Having said all that I can’t see what the big deal is. Is there anything that says you HAVE to upgrade to version 3 and pay money? Surely you can just stay on 2.65 on the free licence? The only thing that I see I might loose is the ability to appear on the recently updated list on their website – not that much of a big deal to me as most of my hits come from google anyway.

I changed the menu on the right hand side to put the archives in a nifty drop down menu, and added a category selection too. Code was taken from une very stylish fille: Drop down menus in TypePad but you can actually use the code as-is in MovableType – no changes necessary. Thanks Daisy for posting the link

For ages now, I’ve been getting the error message “MT::App::CMS=HASH(0x83a8228) Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at lib/MT/App/CMS.pm line 2420.” when I post a blog entry. It doesn’t always happen but only sometimes. The last couple of posts are examples of where it happens. This morning I did a bit more digging and apparently it occurs when there is a problem with pings. I’ll do a bit more digging later but at least it doesn’t mean “error out of cheese, formatting hard disk”

As Neil has reposted/boasted 🙂 about the link to his blog from one of MT’s authors on pinging various services, it prompted me to setup the pings on this blog. I’ve got most of them in there now so it will be interesting to see how long it takes to post an entry. I do wish there was a way to not ping hosts like weblogs.com if you’ve already pinged them as its annoying getting the error message in the logs and a “request timed out” from bloggar.

There’s a call for MT 3.0 alpha testers. I’m not going to be one of them as I don’t know MT well enough and I need this installation to be stable.

MT-Blacklist/Comment Spam Clearinghouse: MT-Blacklist v1.63 beta is out and installed on this box which does include the throttling features (and a few more features too).

Chris pointed out that there is a slight problem with 2.6661 and MT-Blacklist in that there is no throttling due to the order of the plugins overwriting the new functionality. Thats a bit scary as last night I was reading up on (and saw) the effects of a in-the-wild hacking tool for MT and it looks like blacklist may not stop this. I’m hesitant to go into details here but email me if you want more information.