Upgraded to MT 4.0

The upgrade brings some new functions on the author and administrator side including a real WYSIWYG editor. The dashboard and controls on the administration and control side are much clearer, and the navigation is simpler, with screen links to save navigation up, across and back down. They have a new way of saving images and media files into the MySQL database and CMS as assets and managing them. The old system involved uploading the image files to the server and linking to them from blog entries. I have started to put photos in a separate database in Gallery, so I don't know how this is going to work for me. I will get a Gallery random image block running in the sidebar of the blog

They have added a new publishing feature called a page.  It can be written like an entry but it is not published to the main index page or to the entry archive.  It is published to a folder, and can be used as regular web page.  MT pages will be indexed for Tags, but not for the time based archive lists..

MT have done some good work work on the design side. The template system is really neat. It's not actually new - they went there with MT 3.34 I think, but they have tuned it and they are really encouraging adopting the new templates. Unfortunately they have backward compatibility issues. The upgrade respects existing php or html templates for entries, the existing main page template, and existing stylesheets. It refuses to refresh any template that it recognizes as customer. There a work around to refresh all templates, but this has to finished by a poorly documented process of deleting some legacy templates, and mapping some of the new templates to output the right files. This is slow and frustrating because it is trial and error to find the stuff that has to be deleted.

I wasn't that fond of my customizations, so I was prepared to blow them out and try the new templates and styles.  It was useful to find the points that could be changed and to see how it played out on screen. With that out of the way, style changes are easier. Changing from a three column to a two column style involves changing a couple of letters in one of the master templates, or running the Stylecatcher plug-in. Most of the hard editing work goes into changing things in the sidebar templates, which seems to be a matter of cuttiing and pasting widgets (MT talk for blocks of codes).  They have some widgets for some several basic customizations like getting a drop-down list of monthly archives instead of a list of past months.  The sidebar templates have "if" conditions to change published output depending whether the sidebar is called for the main index, an entry, or a list of entries by date, category or tag, while keeping a basic organization and appearance.