Today, we've released more information about TypeKey, which should serve to answer some of the initial questions potential users may have.

While designed first with comment registration in mind, TypeKey will not be limited to usage in Six Apart products. For developers, we plan to offer documentation on integrating TypeKey authentication into your own applications shortly after the service launches.

Look for more information about TypeKey in the coming weeks at typekey.com.

We're taking our first steps towards the release of Movable Type 3.0. The pre-beta version has just finished its initial two rounds of alpha testing and we're now opening the testing to a larger audience (we've picked 300 random addresses from those who applied and will be adding more as time progresses).

The testing that we're conducting will not only help ensure a stable final release but will also give us an opportunity to receive feedback on feature implementation from both users and developers.

Starting today, we'll be giving all of our users much more information on what to expect in Movable Type 3.0.

The official 3.0 release will contain a significant change to the existing interface that embraces web standards, usability and localization. This will also be reflected in a new set of default templates that will implement more of the best practices that both Movable Type and TypePad have become known for.

With a suite of comment management features and versatile comment registration--utilizing a centralized authentication service we're calling TypeKey--Movable Type 3.0 will give you more control than ever before over the public face of your website. We've spent a lot of time planning a comment registration system that will fit the needs of different types of webloggers, and we have focused our attention on a system that will encourage registration and open communication.

In addition to providing authentication for comment registration, TypeKey's open nature will enable developers to build applications upon the infrastructure, utilizing its authentication hooks. Since TypeKey and comment registration are such a significant addition to Movable Type 3.0, we'll be going into more detail about these features later this week.

In addition, our support for the Atom API and syndication feeds will allow Movable Type users to utilize the richer content model offered by the new format, including the use of clients that communicate through the API.

And for developers who like to get under the hood, we've added many new hooks into the application, allowing plugins more control over data, configuration, and user interface.

COMING UP:

If you haven't been added to the testing list yet, don't worry. We've got lots of you who we want to add to the list once the initial bugs have been worked out, so we can get your valuable feedback without being distracted by minor issues. If you submitted the contact form requesting to be on the beta, keep an eye on your mailbox over the next few weeks.

And stay tuned over the coming days, as we outline some of the other major new areas of improvement in Movable Type 3.0. With the help of our dedicated testers, we're hoping to make this our best version of Movable Type ever.

We're starting to coordinate our round of alpha testing for Movable Type 3.0 that will occur prior to the public beta. If you're a Movable Type authority, plugin developer, web standards advocate or just a Movable Type user with an active commenting community and want to be involved in this round, please drop us a line using the Movable Type contact form.

In this message, please let us know:

1. What version will you be upgrading from?
2. How many total comments are in your installation? (per weblog)
3. Will you enable comment registration? If no, why not?
4. The URL for your weblog(s)

If you're not comfortable installing alpha software, you may want to wait for the public beta. Our schedule calls for alpha testing to begin in the next two weeks.

Thanks as always for your interest in Movable Type!

In recent weeks, open comment systems, and Movable Type weblogs in particular, have become a target for comment spam and comment flooding (automated scripts that send many comments at a time to a weblog entry).

As a stopgap before we release comment registration in Movable Type 3.0, we've released version 2.66 of Movable Type, which includes some protection against comment flooding. We've included a throttling measure so that comments from the same IP address can only be posted every N seconds, where N is configurable (documentation on the setting that controls N). We've also added a measure to automatically ban an IP address based on an abnormal number of comments from the same address in a short period of time. Of course, there are no perfect defenses, and if you're truly concerned about the comments on your weblog, the best defense is prevention by closing old comment threads.

Also in 2.66, we've changed the behavior of <$MTCommentAuthorLink$> to use redirects when linking to URLs given in comments. The goal of this is to defeat the PageRank boost given to spammers by posting in the comments on a weblog.

You can download the 2.66 upgrade from the download page and follow the standard upgrade instructions.

Update: We've released 2.661, an update to 2.66, to fix a problem with invalid XHTML in the comment redirect script, along with using comment IDs instead of URLs to fix an open redirect problem.

Those of you who are hardcore Movable Type users and can't get enough news, tips, and tricks for your blog might want to check out the Resources and Newsfeeds page from the invaluable Movable Type Plugin Directory. Listing dozens of sites that track the latest developments in the community, along with many individuals who are creating new plugins and discovering new ideas, there's plenty of inspiration for your own experimentation with Movable Type.

We realize that official news has been scarce over the last 6-9 months. During this time, our company has grown from two people to seven, and we have launched TypePad. Now that we have hired more engineering resources (and we are still looking for more), we are able to focus again on our Movable Type product line. As mentioned in this post on the Six Log, we're focusing on releasing more personal features in the basic Movable Type package, and concentrating features for businesses, organizations, and large content-driven sites into Movable Type Pro (which, needless to say, has been delayed).

The next version of Movable Type will be version 3.0, a significant and free upgrade. Many oft-requested features will be integrated into this release, including:

• Comment registration. As a response to both comment spam and to the increased usage of Movable Type on large community sites, we'll be adding the option to restrict comments to registered users.
• Improved comment and TrackBack management features.
• New API hooks for plugin developers. Plugins will now be able to hook into many more pieces of Movable Type, including adding callbacks for saving and removing objects, building application methods with integration into the UI, and hooking into the publishing process. This opens up possibilities for plugins to add even more advanced functionality than they're able to do now.
• User interface rebuilt using CSS. We've seen with TypePad that a CSS-based interface gives users very fast application response times, and gives us a flexible interface for making application-wide changes, and we want to give this same speed and flexibility to Movable Type users.
• Support for the Atom API. We've already added Atom syndication feed support in version 2.65 of Movable Type, and we'll be adding publishing support for the API in 3.0.

In addition to the above, we'll be integrating some features into 3.0 that we're not yet ready to announce, but which we know will be very exciting to MT users. Additionally, for those interested in posting from mobile devices, we expect this to be a welcome release.

Movable Type 3.0 will be a free download and upgrade. We have full-time engineering resources devoted to this new version, and we plan to have a beta release in early Q1 of 2004.

A security issue has been found in Movable Type's XML-RPC server. We suggest that all users of Movable Type upgrade their installations to fix this issue.

We have released a new version of Movable Type, version 2.65, to fix this problem. Version 2.65 also includes the mt-send-entry.cgi fix released about 1 month ago.

In addition, version 2.65 includes an Atom syndication template in the default templates, along with an auto-discovery tag in the main index template. It also includes a couple of new tags used for the Atom feeds. If you're upgrading, you can get the syndication template from the default template list.

You can download the 2.65 upgrade from the download page and follow the standard upgrade instructions.

If you'd rather just fix the XML-RPC security issue, you can just replace lib/MT/XMLRPCServer.pm on your server with the new version of XMLRPCServer.pm (this is a ZIP file--extract it and upload the version of XMLRPCServer.pm within to your server in ASCII mode).