Today is a great day for Movable Type users: We're announcing the release candidate of Movable Type 4.2, a new version which takes the top three most frequently requested features from our community and builds them right into the platform:

• A faster and more efficient user experience
• More design options and our simplest and most powerful templates yet
• The best, most effective anti-spam solution

So today we are incorporating all of the work that's been done on the MT 4.15 betas so far and are happy to announce the availability of the first release candidate of the newly rechristened Movable Type 4.2.

A Faster Movable Type

Speed isn't just about making the code faster, it's about looking at the tasks you do every day and making them all more efficient.

• Refined navigation - The primary navigation for getting around Movable Type has been refined and expanded to make getting to the page you need to far more efficient. Fewer clicks means faster blogging.

• Template Preview - Now you never have to wait to see what your site will look like when you tweak or edit your templates. Every Movable Type template can be previewed with a 100% accurate live preview before you actually make changes live on your site.

• Redesigned Template Management Screens - Movable Type's template management screens have been consolidated onto a single screen to not only make navigation simpler, but also to make it easier for you to get a more comprehensive view of all the files their installation publishes.

• Completely Rewritten Search - Movable Type's venerable built-in search system has been rewritten from the ground up to be modernized, much more flexible, and lightning-fast. Now it's easy to create custom-filtered views of your content.

Let's not kid ourselves though, speed is also definitely about making the code faster. To that end, Movable Type 4.2 has incorporated a significant number of enhancements focused on improving the raw performance of the application. And it's worked: Common tasks in Movable Type 4.2 are up to 100 times faster.

To measure our progress in improving performance, we ran our own benchmarks internally against a blog with 3 authors, 3 categories, 10,000 entries and 100,000 comments -- a site that's bigger than 99% of the blogs out there. The results surprised us all:

• Search performance was increased by two orders of magnitude! Yep, that's a 100x improvement.
• Simply upgrading from Movable Type 4.1 to 4.2 can increase publishing speeds by 33% and with module caching turned on the performance increase leaps to over 45%.
• Movable Type 4.2 out of the box is twice as fast as Movable Type 3.36 was out of the box; and if you turn on module caching, Movable Type 4.2 is nearly three times as fast as MT3.

• Feeds.App Lite has been removed from MTOS as it is not properly licensed. Users of the nightlies should be cognizant that previous builds had code that should not have been distributed with MTOS. No worries I think, Tim is a nice guy.
• Numerous upgrade bugs have been fixed since the previous release allowing users to more easily upgrade from MT3 and MT4.01 to MTOS and MT 4.1 Beta. Bugs include a SQL syntax errors for adding/altering an index, a bug in migrating OpenIDs to the external user id column, and more.
• Tags suggestions and auto-complete were not being suggested on the compose screen. This has been fixed.
• Javascript errors were fixed on the compose screen related to the Auto Save feature.
• We have fleshed out the list of Asset icons for the asset management system.
• The asset listing screen had been redesigned to display thumbnails of assets.
• A whole new Edit Asset screen has been added. Hotness.
• The default commenter session timeout has been increased to 3 days to keep your readers "logged in" for a longer period. This is aimed at making commenting easier for returning commenters and users.
• Create Category and Create Folder links were available to users without that permission. Fixed.
• WidgetSet tags have been embedded into the default templates. This closes a long standing hole in the MT design experience. Now widgets can be dragged and dropped and have those displayed on your blog without the need to edit templates.
• Links to category is empty in Individual Archives - fixed.
• XML-RPC callbacks for page editing have been fixed.
• TypeKey authentication redirects a returning user to the wrong post. This has been fixed.
• CSS and JavaScript files are now minimized.
• The Display Options panel's design has been touched up.
• Updating a userpic is now an atomic option - there is no need to save your profile once your userpic has been updated. Change is instant.
• A new global modifier has been added setvar which will capture the output of the tag and save it in a variable of the provided name. For example, the following will create a variable called "last5" containing the titles of the last 5 entries:
• Word character conversion process will now eliminate the <?xml:namespace?> text that causes PHP based systems to croak.
• We have modified the publish dialog/window's button set when an error occurs. Now when an error occurs while publishing a file the following buttons will be display: Edit Template (to edit the template generating the error), Try Again (to try rebuilding the file again), and Close (to close the window).
• Previewing a page and returning to the editor caused the basename field to be cleared. :(
• Templates were being backed up even when the "Create Backups" options was unchecked.
• Only userpics uploaded by the current user are displayed when a user elects to change their userpic from the edit profile screen.
• File size has been added to the insert image asset preview page.
• Creating category from Select Category fly out on edit entry screen was not working.
• Movable Type Open Source link in the footer links to movabletype.com - it now points to .org.
• SetHashVar implemented. For example: <mt:sethashvar name="foo"><mt:setvar name="key1" value="foo"><mt:sethashvar name="key2"><mt:setvar name="key3" value="bar"></mt:sethashvar></mt:sethashvar>
• Learning Movable Type news now loaded without the need for scheduled tasks.
• Asset search now searches asset title.
• On a Page archive template you have the ability to add an Entry mapping. On an Entry archive template you have the ability to add a Page mapping. Neither of these options should exist, if selected they produce errors when publishing. They have been removed.
• <mt:AssetDescription> tag has been created.
• MT::Object::has_meta returns false for MT::Page - fixed.
• Default WidgetSets are now created upon blog initialization.
• AtomPub support - we are now compliant with RFC 5023, bringing an up to date implementation of the Atom Publishing Protocol to Movable Type.
• XML-RPC/Atom doesn't support cancreatepost permission - now it does.
• Added "Align: None" to insert asset dialog - thanks to a hack by Beau. Beau better be careful, he is dangerously close to being an engineer now. :)
• Password reminder feature assumes the password recovery field is your birthplace. The error messaging around this has been fixed.
• Small MT logo icon has been updated with new logo color.
• OpenID error messaging has been improved to be more human friendly.
• Bad header position on management group and blog on system level screens - this collided with status messaging, which is now fixed.

Professional Pack Change Log

• Commercial Pack has been renamed Professional Pack.
• Custom fields now have a post_remove callback to remove metadata from plugin data when a field is removed.
• User Fields quick filter added for the blog level.
• Security: JavaScript code inputted into Description of Custom Fields was being executed in the edit entry screen.
• Custom Field name values were not being escaped properly in the administration UI. This has been fixed.

Enterprise Change Log

• TheSchwartz was not working with Oracle in some cases. This has been fixed.

1. Windows Vista and IIS Support - There is a known bug in IIS 7 that prevents all but the last cookie sent by a browser to actually be set. This affects all web applications deployed on IIS 7. This does not affect Windows Vista users using Apache, and it does not affect users using Windows Vista to access an MT blog not hosted under IIS7.
2. 45146 - Nokia Lifeblog Protocol support to AtomServer.pm
3. 47781 - Requests via XMLRPC to mod_perl'd MT results in error
4. 48418 - Filterable user listing by role
5. 48562 - [UI] Backup/Restore feature needs to look better
6. 48813 - Default Templates: remove redundant code & simplify header
7. 49882 - Thank you for waiting message doesn't make sense with LDAP commenting
8. 49886 - Need a new icon for "Pending authors"
9. 50451 - Implement page specific context sensitive help links
10. 50523 - Comment Detail default template should wrap commenter name in a separate span
11. 50828 - Uploading an image does not make the associated asset type as Image
12. 50846 - 3 MT Theme Comps
13. 50936 - RebuildQueue: Entries seem to be published by CMS even when RQ is supposed to be handling it
14. 51227 - deprecate mt3_styles.css
15. 51291 - MTEntries with entry_id in dynamic category/date-based archives
16. 51357 - Add Padding to text inputs app-wide
17. 51642 - Left nav weirdness on edit role screen after role is created
18. 52119 - View and Rebuild never hover state
19. 52158 - Button Styling App-Wide
20. 52289 - Create New Role Screen has no "cancel"
21. 52369 - Backup/Restore: dialogs are not styled
22. 52770 - Unintuitive rebuild and view site icons
23. 52947 - Settings Tweaks
24. 53009 - Member Status Icons clipped
25. 53011 - Syntax Highlighting toggle icons
26. 53019 - "Members" listing screen doesn't include Role column
27. 53070 - The background color is stuck out from the blog context selector (IE7 only)
28. 53125 - Can't Edit Entry if StaticWebPath is different sub/domain than url to MT app
29. 53230 - Selection of tabs appear on mt_news dashboard widget might be good to be localizable
30. 53271 - Kill "User#1" - include display name in initial set-up sequence
31. 53298 - User without system level privileges and access to only one blog can see system nav when editing profile
32. 53317 - New TrackBack Ping alert email lacks links to view and edit trackback
33. 53375 - UI inconsistency - left-side navigation doesn't appear on Activity Log Screen
34. 53520 - Entry editor does not sidescroll for long lines
35. 53583 - Cleanup of Base Stylesheet template
36. 53593 - Weird login behavior with memcached
37. 53810 - Consistentcy of text input, select menu, and textarea styling
38. 53883 - Activity log table gets busted
39. 53895 - Update Search and Replace to use Users/Members instead of Commenters
40. 53973 - Archive Mapping Messaging is not displayed inline w/ setting
41. 54052 - Modal Polishing - Restore
42. 54263 - Enable 'Learning Movable Type' news feed
43. 54318 - Search results screen a bit crowded
44. 54390 - Layout is broken on member listing screen when authenticated users exist
45. 54422 - Blank error message during upgrade from 3.14 to MT4 using mysql * 5
46. 54438 - Templates aren't rebuided automatically when swtching from static to dynamic (archive templates)
47. 54465 - Related links styling
48. 54497 - Feeds.App Lite: Feed that includes Japanese garbles text on the published page.
49. 54578 - Comment Response template needs Header and Footer installed
50. 54658 - Search and Replace styling
51. 54666 - Search box on templates pages says "search entries"
52. 54724 - Add "Create User" link to Manage > Users table
53. 54725 - File options step lacking edit fields when inserting file into post
54. 54726 - Plugins listing page needs styling - uses old style
55. 54736 - MT_TRANS appears when viewing comment spam details
56. 54750 - Integrate author and date-based category archives into the core
57. 54797 - "Select Blogs" link not showing up for sys admin?
58. 54804 - mt-upgrade.cgi has old styling
59. 54809 - First entry and comment should be L10'ed for EMEA languages
60. 54817 - MT "bug" in footer is getting cut off on top and bottom using Vox theme

• The good stuff: The free download of MT4 Beta 5, screenshots of the new version and an index of our screencasts, in case you like movies.
• Find out What's New, what stuff we're still working on, and what changes we've just made. We've got the requisite FAQ, too.
  
• Too lazy busy to install MT4 all by yourself, but the screencasts aren't enough? Check out Time To Give It A Try for info on free demo installs and an Amazon EC2 image, all created by our community.
• If you're the RTFM type, we've got documentation and the all-important Getting Started guide. If you're upgrading from an older version of MT, you'll want to check out Works with MT4 to make sure your stuff... works with MT4.

tar xvzf MT-4.0-beta4-20070627.tar.gz

cd MT-4.0-beta4-20070627

cp -r -f . ../mtcgi/