Movable Type 4 beta

Like any good Movable Type user, I've been testing the betas of Movable Type 4. On the face of it, there are at least a number of improvements that make the effort worthwhile. However, there are far too many plug-ins that I use that are incompatible with it.

Keyvalues doesn't work; Media Manager stops the whole blog from working; MT-Blogroll is broken; Smart Rebuild stops any rebuilding ('republishing' as it now is in MT4); and Fast Search, which I eulogised about earlier, is going to need an update too.

SimplyThreaded and MT Compare are classed as unnecessary in MT4 because there's equivalent functionality. Well that's all right then, isn't it? All I have to do is check all my templates are rewrite them accordingly...

As it is, it looks like with Keyvalues down, I'm going to have to split the blogs up into two separate installations so that some can use the new MT4 features and others can keep working.

The trouble with the MT4 beta, apart from the bugs, is there's so little documentation. It's fairly easy to report bugs and say “these features have stopped working on my blog”, but it's a lot harder to talk about the shiny new features when there's no clear idea on how to implement them.

Some of the new features are also at 0.1 status - so while I love the new ability to authenticate via LiveJournal, OpenID, etc, the Google account plug-in is optional and gives anyone using it a generic name if they sign in.

How do I implement the threaded comments properly? How do I implement the recommendations framework? So many things, so little to work with.

I'm just going to keep adapting my templates to the new modular approach taken with MT4 and feed in the extra capabilities as they become clear. It should, I hope, be worth it.