jeff eaton

So everyone's buzzing about the official announcement that Movable Type 4.0 is now available under the GPL license. For those who haven't been paying attention for the last couple of years, MT was the killer app for bloggers who wanted more control over their site and didn't have the time or the inclination to roll their own.

The release of Movable Type 3 alienated a lot of users by (gasp!) charging for multi-author blogs and installations with more than 3 installed blogs. It wasn't a big deal for most people, but it priced a lot of midrange hobbyists out of the MT world and set up the pins for Wordpress's ultimate domination of the universe. Movable Type remains a very strong multi-blog management system, and it has a great ecosystem of extensions. There's also a large pool of designers familiar with its purely tag-based templating language. The licensing hiccups with version 3, though, left a lot of individual users wondering if future penny-pinching would result in a squeeze for more licensing fees from smaller blogs.

The official release of MT4 under the GPL eliminates that fear, and opens up potential for adaptation and enhancement that's previously been off-limits. While MT's source code has always been available and hackable for its customers and users, it was "free as in beer," not "free as in speech." In other words, the modifications I made to enhance it couldn't be distributed to other users as "Enhanced Movable Type," nor could I distribute a copy of MT pre-configured with popular extensions.

While this isn't a big deal for many users, it's a big deal for interoperability with other GPL projects like Joomla! and Drupal. Those projects can now legally build bridges to the MT sourcecoude, integrating MT blogs into larger solutions like portal sites and intranets. It will also make the next version of Gutenberg, my Movable Type compatibility theme for Drupal, quite a bit easier to maintain. Why? I'll be able to legally include some of the MovableType base stylesheets in the Gutenberg download, making that theme usable from the moment it's installed, rather than pointing users to a separate download. It's a small step, but an important one, towards making multiple blogging systems compatible with each other for designers.

This principle goes both ways -- it's now possible for SixApart to make use of a large pool of GPL code that's in use in the wild. While I'm sure that wasn't their motivation, it's a nice door to have open. For companies like SixApart, where hosted services and corporate support contracts are the primary revenue stream, this approach is win-win. While it may not bring the legions of WordPress users back to the fold, it's a great moment for SixApart and Open Source software.

If you've spent any time in the Drupal community, you've run into the unstoppable Angela Byron -- a.k.a., Webchick. She's one of the pillars of the Drupal community: she writes documentation, helps train new users, organizes important projects, tests patches, writes modules, writes patches for Drupal Core, is a member of the Drupal Association board, and is basically everywhere at once and friendly while doing it.

Last night, while she helped organize a dinner for Drupal's founder Dries Buytaert, Webchick's car was broken into and her MacBook Pro was stolen. Like most of us geeks, Webchick's laptop is the hub of an entire digital life, and replacing it is no picnic. The good news, though, is that it gives us all a chance to do something cool for Webchick -- I've set up a Chipin.com fundraiser to replace Angie's laptop. Let's see if the Drupal community can take care of this little problem and get a brand new computer in her hands, eh? Eh! If you want to toss a few coppers in the can for Webchick, click here!

UPDATE! Hooooray! We raised just over $1500 for Angie, enough to pay for what her insurance company didn't cover, and some spiffy add-ons to make her computing experience even spiffier. She's now getting back into the swing of things and should be around soon! Thanks to everyone who donated and expressed their support. The Drupal community rocks.

Greg Knaddison is working on a list of statistics to track the health of the Drupal community. One of the stats mentioned was "Number of Ponies Eaton Owes Dries for Core Commits."

For the record, I am currently four ponies in the hole. Three of these ponies were accumulated during the early FormAPI 3 development and testing process. The fourth was lost to Dries during a secret high-stakes game of poker that resulted in the repositioning of the Primary Links menu in Drupal 6's standard page.tpl.php file.

This blog post will be updated in the future as more pony-debt is accumulated.

So I couldn't sleep last night. What did I do? I went to Free CSS Templates and downloaded a CC 2.5 CSS skin. And I made a new Drupal 6 theme. This is easy enough that it could turn into a habit...

"Bought 500 grams of neutral-flavored pop rocks and a probe thermometer. Not actually sure what to do with the pop rocks." --drumm's twitter log

Today's my first full day back home after a fabulous week in Barcelona with the Lullabot crew and other crazy Drupal-heads. It's going to be tough writing a good recap, because a lot of my excitement about the conference revolves around crossed paths and conversations, great ideas that were born and plans that were forged.

I'll be writing a lot more in the coming day or so about some proposals for Drupal 7, and how we can leverage the work in Drupal 6 effectively. But for now, I'm relaxing and getting over jetlag and reflecting on how much I enjoyed Barcelona, how much I am glad to be back home with my wife, and how awesome it is working with a team of people that I can honestly call my friends. It rocks.

One of the stand-out memories of the past week was a great dinner with Steven Wittens of Bryght, Allie Micka of Advantage Labs, and the dynamic duo of CCK development, Karen Stephenson and Yves Chedemois. Plan to meet up with a larger group of Drupal folks stumbled, and we ended up sharing awesome paella and sangria while talking about code, plans for the future, shared stories, and other fun. It was great to hang out and catch up with them as peers and just-plain-cool-people, under fireworks in the pleasant Mediterranean air.

The FormAPI 3 presentation went better than I expected -- I was slotted in the main room, which I wasn't expecting at all, so there were odd moments of disorientation as I manned the "panel discussion table" solo. All turned out well, though, and I think the important bits got through. I'm tinkering around with a presentaiton-sharing site to post the slides; hopefully it will work.

Also? We found a crepe bar. The crepe artiste named Elmer made us awesome crepes with things like lime chocolate, and talked smack about George W. Bush. He's from Holland and -- in case this wasn't emphasized enough -- made really awesome crepes.

So after a crazy week or two, the Lullabots and I are heading to the Barcelona Drupalcon. We're looking forward to hanging out, geeking, and meeting up with the rest of the Drupal community. It's my first trip outside the country -- Catherine's bopped around Europe before but I'll be seeing things for the first time. Hopefully, I'll get a chance to play with the camera and I'll flickr my brains out. Woo!

With Drupal 6 entering beta now, momentum in the community is picking up even more. It'll be very interesting to see what new ideas and directions come out of the conference.

To those who've already arrived, see you in 15 hours!

I've been all kinds of busy for the last several weeks, and haven't bothered posting much to any of the usual spots. Drupal 6's pre-beta cycle is rolling along, though it seems to be a little less purposeful than the last release cycle. It feels a little like the community is waiting for something to happen, without being sure what that something is.

Over the weekend, though, I did manage to put some of the finishing touches on Growing Up Goddy, a group blog for a circle of folks who spent serious time in the Evangelical Christian subculture. It's in the early experimental phase, but hopefully it can be an interesting place and perhaps a launching pad for some good research and commentary.

I had some free time last night after work, and decided to finish up some design work I'd done on Catherine's blog. Sh humors my occasional bursts of geekery on her 'home turf', with occasional 500 errors and muttered comments about testing new code. I'm pretty happy with the results, though -- a modified OSWD design and the addition of the WebSnapr module gave the boost of New Spiffiness that it had been lacking.