BG Views Developer Blog

Setting up a URL Shortener with YOURLS

2010-08-30T04:26:26Z

Right about the time Bit.ly Pro was announced and they were taking invites, I wanted to setup our own URL shortener. Short URLs are very important in the Twitter World, and brand recognition is also important. As it turns out we finally got our Bit.ly Pro invite about a month and a half after setting up YOURLS. And frankly, I would rather have complete control anyways.
Step 1. Find a great short URL. I am pretty proud of the domain hack I found, http://bgne.ws/. I later noticed that the AP is using something similar, what a coincidence: apne.ws. There are a number of places to look but Domainr is one of the best. It searches TLDs as well as other hacks such as using folders or subdomains. With so many TLD extensions out there these days, you should be able to find a creative use of your brand name.

Step 2. Install YOURLS. See the Install page for details. It is pretty much fill in the blanks in the config.php file, something you should be used to by now. Right?

Some advice:

define('YOURLS_UNIQUE_URLS', true); Set this to true so that your system does not churn out 10 short links for 1 article. If someone tries to shorten something that has already been shortened, it just returns the existing short URL.

define('YOURLS_PRIVATE', true); I don't recommend setting up a public install of YOURLS, that is just asking for trouble.

$yourls_user_passwords In this array make sure to create at least one username/password set that has special characters (just use alphanumeric). This is so when you want to use your YOURLS API with TweetDeck, Twitter for iPhone, or any number of other Twitter services, you don't have a headache.

.htaccess Tip: You cannot use YOURLS in the same directory as other apps that make heavy use of URL rewrites, such as WordPress. Best to run YOURLS in as clean an environment as possible.

Step 3. Make the Home Page look spiffy. Obviously optional, but it took little time to change the default home page into our site's shell.

At this point you are all setup. You can now create short URLs yourself, even use the Bit.ly standard of adding a + at the end of the URL to see the stats (such as here). You can automate the creation of these short links for WordPress, and now Movable Type, and you can even use the API for your own YOURLS install.

If you are not using WordPress or Movable Type, and can't find a plugin for your needs, you can still make easy use of the API. Read this Gist. The only problem with that is that it would run every time the page was accessed, and it does not store the Short URL in a database. You would want to add the following to your config.php to disable flood blocking:

define('YOURLS_FLOOD_DELAY_SECONDS', 0);

There is a better way to handle this in Movable Type, Twitter Tools. I will cover that in a future post.

Third Party Tools

Lets setup YOURLS so you can easily use it with some third party tools. I will be using TweetDeck and Twitter for iPhone (Tweetie 2) as examples.

Step 1. Duplicate yourls-api.php and give it a unique name, something short. Edit this new file and delete the Line yourls_maybe_require_auth(); (this should be Line 4). This allows you to pass options to your API and not require a login. Typing the URL on a mobile device is hard enough as it is.

Using YOURLS with TweetDeck

In Preferences, go to Services and change the Short URL service from Bit.ly (or whatever it is currently set to) to Other. Now use the following URL as a template, modify the domain and the filename to the API file you just duplicated:

http://domain.com/filename.php?action=shorturl&format=simple&url=%@

Now pasting URLs into TweetDeck will use our own URL Shortening service.

Using YOURLS with Twitter for iPhone

Also known as Tweetie 2 before Twitter bought it. Go to the "..." button in the bottom toolbar and Accounts & Settings. Click on Settings, Services, URL Shortening. Select custom and very carefully type in the same URL used above, then hit Save.

http://domain.com/filename.php?action=shorturl&url=%@&format=simple

When you paste a URL into the New Tweet menu touch the little icon that displays how many characters you have remaining, and touch the Shrink URLs button. It will now shorten them using your YOURLS install!

Since we don't use WordPress, I can't speak for how easy it is to use that plugin, but it looks pretty strait forward. In my next post I will go over how to use Twitter Tools for Movable Type with YOURLS, which is what we do have setup for The BG News.

AnythingSlider for Movable Type

2010-08-29T04:34:35Z

Before the break for the summer semester, I sat down with Sean Shapiro and Heather Linder, or Web Editor and Editor-in-Chief, respectively, and we took a look at what they wanted to see on bgnews.com for the fall. Top of that list was an image-based carousel.

Feature-wise, the one we were currently using was not cutting the mustard. I took a good hard look at Agile Carousel, and even started writing Movable Type code to work with it. But its not exactly easy to use. Then I ran into AnythingSlider by Chris Coyier and eventually an even better fork of it by Dean Sofer on GitHub. That is the history lesson, now lets move on to AnythingSlider for Movable Type. AnythingSlider for Movable Type consists of two plugins, one for changing all the settings of the carousel itself, and one for managing each slide. I am currently using this plugin on a few client web sites, bgnews.com being one of them, and am continuing to develop it - there are more options I want to expose in a Movable Type interface.

The download also comes with Mark Carey's TemplateInstaller, as I have created a set of templates, modules and widgets for AnythingSlider. Mark was nice enough to allow me to package his plugin in with mine.

AnythingSlider for Movable Type was written in Config Assistant for a couple reasons. Config Assistant makes development and upkeep a snap, and allows virtually anyone to make modifications to my AnythingSlider plugin. Say you want to use Pages instead of Entries in your carousel. This is a trivial change in the YAML code of the AnythingSlider plugin, and nothing else needs to be modified.

See the README for installing, including prerequisites. You will likely need to modify the CSS and the Template Modules to fit the size and style of your carousel. Currently there is an image-based slider, and an article-based slider (like on bgnews.com) installed with the Template Modules.

There is more to come soon, just watch GitHub for updates.

Do you use Google Reader?

2010-08-29T01:33:24Z

If you use Google Reader, we have a Bundle for you! This is a bundle of BG Views Network sites. It currently has seven feeds in it, but we will be adding more shortly.

What I do not understand is this: When I update the bundle, subscribers do not automatically see the changes to the Bundle. They must click Subscribe again. Why is this not automatic? A Google help forum post on this very subject has gone unanswered too, so I am not the only one seeing this as a problem.

Housing Guide Update

2010-08-29T01:02:14Z

Another section of the site that was a priority this summer was the Housing Guide. I have made small changes to both the Mobile template as well as the standard template, mainly aesthetic changes.

Also new is the Search box on the right, and the Advanced Search page. Although the Advanced Search form is not complete, you can drill down to search by all the fields there. Look for more options to show up there very soon.

Restructured Home Page

2010-08-28T23:06:24Z

For the start of this semester, we have introduced a restructured home page with a bigger carousel. Please let me know what you think! I have more work to do on the home page, but it needed to be simplified.

There is still the problem that I have so many external scripts running, that when the page loads, the carousel takes a second to fully load. That is what causes the navigation buttons to "pop" in like that. Currently there is CSS in place to minimize the strange loading, and that "pop" effect is the best I can do for now.
I have been working with a friend to asynchronously load Wibiya, Issuu, Monster, and OpenX scripts. Hopefully I can get to testing that out this weekend.

The carousel itself is a Movable Type plugin that I wrote, and is based on the AnythingSlider jQuery plugin. More on that in a future post.

On a less technical note, I will be adding more carousel slides and community content to the bgnews.com home page soon, such as our Housing Guide and Housing Forum, which remain one of the most popular parts of our site.

Summer means development time

2010-05-12T07:45:17Z

Summer is here, and Summer Session starts soon. Before classes ended for Spring I sat down with our Web Editor Shawn and our EIC Heather to outline the changes they would like to see on bgnews.com.

The menu bar is going to get a slight tweaking, moving things around. The layout of bgnews.com is also going to change quite a bit, going to a two-column layout.

There are a bunch of other things on the To Do list for the summer, but those I will get to in due time.

Fix WordPress Export User Interface

2010-04-27T03:00:00Z

Thanks to the CoPress Google Group and @nacin, my life in WordPress is that much easier. By about 100%. Let me explain.

The drop down menu on the Export page (in 2.9.1. and before) is an absolute mess. It does not list authors in alphabetical order. It lists them in the order they appear in the database. We have 10 years of archives to go through - that equates to a lot of authors! (Plus countless duplicates, thanks to the way College Publisher works.)

Quickly after posting my concern asking how to fix the $authors array, Andrew came up with a superb solution. You can find it on the WordPress Trac and make the modification yourself. This change will make it into WordPress 3.0. It also looks like the database query has been cleaned up quite a bit from the original code.

Many thanks to Andrew and his help. It has made the absolutely painstakingly headache-inducing task of going through our old College Publisher archives a little bit easier at the end of the day.

BG News Archives Update Feb. 19

2010-02-19T05:59:27Z

One of the biggest challenges in moving away from College Publisher has been the 10 years of archives we have had online. As I am sure you are aware, those were abruptly taken down in January.

Simply put, there was no other way to switch from their servers to ours.

We are working tirelessly to get the archive back online, and today I would like to share (a new) update on that. I sent out an update on our Facebook Fan Page on Feb. 8, and I wish I could say we have made progress since then.

Hit the jump to hear the (somewhat condensed) updated info.
As it turns out, the entirety of the archive coming out of CP5, well, 90% + had no categories. Add to that the fact that over 50% had no authors, and you can bet how I felt about that.

Luckily I still had the CP4 export I had gotten in January 2009 from College Publisher, which does have authors and categories. So the import process had to be started again, from scratch.

Then when the CP5 era posts (January through December 2009) were imported, they lacked categories, a small problem with the import script. There was another problem with the media field, thanks to inconsistencies with the CP5 data structure. These issues have been resolved.

So the CP5 era posts have to be deleted and re-imported, again. This has been a very long process and I figured it would be a bear - and I was right! :/

Hopefully by Sunday I will have the CP5 era entries to work with, with categories. My job then requires me to combine categories and authors (some instances occur that we have 5 or 6 of the same author). Once that is done, I can load the articles into the live site on bgnews.com.

That is the best I can do for an update. I apologize to those who are seeking clips for resumes and job applications, or just searching for a past article. The best I can do is point you to our Issuu account.

As always, I will post here once there is a significant update.

BG News YouTube Now in Google News

2010-01-30T04:07:43Z

I was just trying to find an example of our YouTube videos showing up in Google News. It did not take long, searching for "Obama Ohio" and look what came up.

"Sweet!"

Project Update: Jan. 13 to 19, 2010

2010-01-28T02:53:02Z

I should have thought of this a year ago. What is the best way to keep updates on anything? Twitter of course. And what is the best To-Do list out there? 37 Signals Ta-Da List. So thanks to Twitterfeed and Action Streams, I now have a daily log of what I have done, and what needs to be done. Also handy as a running tally to show the boss.

Since Twitter is not an archive, it is not a Wayback Machine, so I will be posting week-by-week accounts here to this blog. Highlights here and all the super-dry stuff after the jump.

We re-launched bgnews.com on January 12, this is what got done in the first week publishing our own daily newspaper after the long nights of getting everything done for a smooth launch. Here are the highlights.

Setup RSS 2.0 feed for MyBGSU (BlackBoard doesn't like Atom I guess)
Started talks with Andrew Spittle at CoPress about our CP5 archives
Added ability to embed photo galleries in articles
bgviews.com domain finally under our control
Categorized the issue indexes
Got my carousel picker plugin working thanks to Byrne
Met with MediaMate talking about national ads and online ads

19 Jan 2010

@ 14:55 Earlier today I submitted The BG News to become an official Google News source, and replied to their automated email as requested.
@ 14:54 Met with MediaMate and Bob, Cindy, Tonya to talk about advertising.
@ 11:12 To-Do: Added: archive lists are messed up in Safari AND IE7. Fun.
@ 05:00 To-Do: Added: update Blog Search widget to hide if on an ErrorDocument
@ 03:42 Worked on getting more Issuu shelves in our PDF Archive by Month page. But it is too late to do any more.
@ 03:08 Basically the widgets now work 100% on every site in the network except for bgnews.com because of that Monster inline code. Still looking...
@ 02:38 Too bad falconscreech.com is taken, I looked months ago when we started running them in the paper.
@ 02:37 Add the most recent Falcon Screech to the home page. This is automated, and will always show the most recent entry.
@ 02:35 Now the accordion loads on document.ready so it works right away. Oddly enough when page finish loading accordion collapses.

18 Jan 2010

@ 21:54 Accordion now works in IE7. Found an issue where it will not fully load if there is an external script like Monster, which we make money.
@ 04:23 Working on an accordion script for the right sidebar for most popular/most comments, etc. Close to complete, still having IE7 issue.

17 Jan 2010

@ 19:44 updated the letters to the editor form.
@ 18:30 To-Do: Added: add UTM tracking to Tweet This bit.ly script.
@ 18:30 To-Do: Added: add UTM tracking to all RSS feeds, starting with BG News
@ 18:30 To-Do: Added: update network search results template
@ 17:22 The monthly archives are now broken out by category, with the date listed next to them, too. http://bit.ly/7zAdJg
@ 15:31 Issue index is done and looks awesome. has headings per category and hides categories with zero count for that day http://bit.ly/4qpFI4
@ 10:41 blah wrong account.

16 Jan 2010

@ 23:06 Was able to break out the Issue index by category. Hope I can figure out how to hide categories that have zero posts in them.
@ 15:30 To-Do: Completed: re-configure google apps for domains once bgviews.com is transfered.
@ 14:24 since we now control bgviews.com, deleted the add-on domains and created the real subdomains for m.bgviews.com and others.
@ 13:52 Google Apps MX and CNAME records have been entered for bgviews.com, hopefully that will propagate soon, though their TTL sucks.
@ 11:11 bgviews.com is still resolving to CP servers on campus, it has not propagated yet. works at home (TWC).
@ 08:30 To-Do: Completed: get bgviews.com transfered from college publisher.
@ 08:14 bgviews.com now redirects to bgnews.com with a 301 redirect. it will do that until I get the apache aliases setup.
@ 01:38 setup bgviews.com on our dedicated box. will be caching with CP for a while now, they have a large CDN. need to setup CNAME and MX records.
@ 01:36 bgviews.com finally transfered into our godaddy account. they could have quickly accepted it; but waited the five days. lame.

15 Jan 2010

@ 11:50 fixed one of the CSS issues in IE7, the one where the asset-meta was getting squashed in the carousel. displays correctly now.
@ 04:47 opened a ticket with 6A support about importing/exporting custom field data. going to need to import cp5_image not sure how yet.

14 Jan 2010

@ 18:55 got the photo gallery setup for article pages. now just need to write the documentation on how to do it. http://bit.ly/7p2c5h
@ 15:08 making headway on getting the photo gallery widget added to the Entry screen in MT.
@ 15:03 spoke with Andrew Spittle for about an hour about moving our CP5 data into WP XML or even MT compatible format. I need to provide samples.
@ 14:48 changed the photo gallery on the bgnews.com home page to load most recent not feature photos
@ 00:15 To-Do: Added: add custom field and code to add a gallery to an entry.

13 Jan 2010

@ 21:41 added code to my plugin to show/hide the breaking and updates spotlight boxes. need to add it to the template now.
@ 19:15 To-Do: Added: move all inline css to external files
@ 15:24 The @bgviews feed is back in MyBGSU now, thanks to Dong Chen for his help.
@ 08:45 To-Do: Added: restruct use of byline name in MT code for profile view
@ 08:45 To-Do: Added: configure bgviews.com for apache aliases /mt and /errors once transfered
@ 08:45 To-Do: Added: once we get the database from college publisher, provide it to wordpress developer
@ 08:45 To-Do: Added: re-configure blogs.bgviews.com when bgviews.com is transfered
@ 08:45 To-Do: Added: re-configure m.bgviews.com when bgviews.com is transfered
@ 07:22 updated comment policy to reflect zero tolerance for spam posts and comments. added direct link in comments block in MT templates.
@ 06:24 after many attempts, cannot get mt:entryid to output correctly as a variable in my carousel plugin. emailed byrne.
@ 05:15 Added: fix broken carousel plugin i wrote.
@ 05:14 added documentation to internal site for creating entries in MT
@ 05:13 added falcon screech to profile view template. posts/comments/favorites now show up.
@ 04:57 added easy way for bob, others to keep updated on project development history with twitter and to-da list accounts. setup public web page.
@ 04:15 updated carousel plugin is now live. need to modify code in MT template to work with variables.
@ 04:14 forgot to mention, bgsu summer session ad is now live on the site.
@ 03:55 working on fixing the carousel picker plugin for the home page.
@ 03:45 created rss 2.0 feed for dong chen
@ 03:43 bgnews site went live in movable type tuesday jan 12 at about 4 am.

BG News in Google News

2010-01-26T06:49:49Z

I must say I am impressed as to how fast Google added us to Google News. I am less impressed that despite the fact that I submitted our site name as The BG News (just so happens to be our name) that we are known in Google News right now as "Bowling Green News."

This means my news sitemap XML file will not validate, because of the site name mismatch. So until Google gets around to answering my question, we will be known as Bowling Green News in Google News, and then when it is set to our proper name, I will have to change our news sitemap XML file again.

Nice of them to be quick about including us, kind of a pain in the ass they screwed up our name.

UPDATE: Good news! They got back to me today saying our name has changed. So we will see tomorrow once they pull our articles if the news sitemap throws an error.

Update on BG News Archive

2010-01-26T05:48:43Z

I have an update about our little problem of missing about 10 years of archives from our site. Since leaving College Publisher in December, we have been patiently, eagerly, relentlessly waiting for our archives and users databases. This past Saturday College Publisher provided the archive database to us. Yea... don't get excited yet.

We have contracted CoPress to convert our CP5 data to something we can use, namely WordPress WXR format. CoPress seems to be the go-to place for refugees of College Publisher. I looked into them but have a fond liking for Movable Type, if you have not noticed.

Once I get our data in WordPress WXR and have it running in a WP site, I have a lot of manual data manipulation ahead of me. While CP4 had Sections, CP5 did not. While CP4 had both Author Names and Author Positions, CP5 did not. Not to mention there is over 4 years of data in there from before we partnered with College Publisher!

Once I can combine Authors and Categories in WordPress, I can export another WXR and then do the final import of my sanitized archive - from mid-2000 - into Movable Type. Then it will be time to have a geek dance.

Wibiya Toolbar starts open beta, rocks

2010-01-17T11:31:33Z

We have been testing the Wibiya Toolbar since June, and are happy with the results. The developers have been very open to our feedback and have even modified our toolbar to work directly with our Google Custom Search Engine. It has been great working with Dror and his crew, and are glad they have incorporated our feedback.

Although the closed beta was not exclusive (most beta requests were filled quickly) it is now open for anyone to setup a toolbar, so check it out.

A lot is new under the hood. First off they have a new CDN for the script, and new code to add to your web page. I can immediately see the difference in speed when loading the toolbar from the CDN script. The next big change is the default search widget is now fully extensible, and easy to work with. The RSS feed widget is extensible in this same way, too.

Lastly they have added a whole slew of new items you can put on the toolbar, and best of all, in my opinion, you can finally take off the "random" button - I always felt that was an eye soar.

Lastly, it looks like they finally fixed a bug they were having with Google Translate, where you would get a Google API error when you used the Translate widget. Nice update guys!

The BG News is powered by Movable Type

2010-01-16T19:53:53Z

The launching of a web site is a stressful one, but the re-launching of one can be enough to kill you. Lucky for me things went smoothly in the wee hours of January 12 (and I am not typing this from the grave).

I would like to say the transition away from College Publisher has been a smooth one, but it in fact has not. Just today the domain name was finally transferred into our account, and it is still not resolving all over the Internets yet. And we do not have our database of past archives, last I talked to CP it looked like I would have them by Friday.

So if you are just tuning in, the entire BG Views Network of sites is running under Movable Type, including The BG News, which was previously partnered with College Publisher. We are by far not the first school to leave College Publisher in recent months, and no doubt won't be the last.

But this post is not about College Publisher, it is about Movable Type, and how we are using it to produce a daily newspaper online.
The remainder of this post is going to seem a bit technical for some. Sorry, but you get no refund.

BG Views Network uses Movable Type Pro running under FastCGI, the actual BG News web site is made up of a number of "blogs." Movable Type Pro was required more for the Custom Fields than the community features, but those are a nice bonus. Here is the short list of MT plugins we use and rely on a daily basis. Some we could do without, some we could have gotten by with the "Lite" version, but in the end my goal in this re-launch was to not just match the feature set of our previous site, but exceed it - and we did that.

The Photo Galleries is built using Byrne Reese's Photo Gallery plugin, in a separate MT install that is not running under FastCGI. His template set switches menus and admin pages and because of how FastCGI caches the application, it just doesn't play nice. I hated to split Photo Galleries out like that, but it had to be done.

As with working with the Motion template set, it was much easier to port my existing BG Views design to Mid-Century (than incorporate it into my design), the theme the Photo Gallery plugin is built using. Using a secondary category archive and a Custom Field in the main BG News blog, I am easily able to embed a gallery within an Entry, such as here.

MT4 Custom Fields offer a lot, but I needed more, and as luck would have it, More Custom Fields by Dan Wolfgang offers just that. MCF is used a lot more in the Housing Guide, but the "Related Articles" you see here are one type of field the plugin provides. We actually use a lot of Dan's plugins; Better File Uploader is essential to sizing, thumbnailing, and lightboxing (in one fell swoop) photos for our Entry pages; Share is used for the "email to a friend" feature; and Poll Position is used for running polls in our blogs and in Entries.

The last "essential" plugin we use, and likely most important, is Byrne's Config Assistant plugin. Without it, updating things like the home page carousel, section pages, or breaking stories would take much more work for our news staff, and if I have one goal, it is to automate as much stuff as humanly possible. Config Assistant lets me do that, in spades. I need to do more with it, I just have not had the time.

There are plugins out there that will embed a Share This toolbar, but I felt it was much better to write my own, including using the bit.ly API for URL shortening.

The other plugin we rely on daily is Visitor Stats Pro, it provides our "Most Read" lists, and stats, referers, and search strings for our articles.

We use many more utility plugins from developers like Byrne and Mark Carey, too, they just makes my life so much easier.

The BG News has been online since 1998 and we have come a long way from hosting it ourselves in West Hall and doing the majority of the work in BBEdit. It is great to be publishing our site again, and Movable Type makes that a breeze.

Movable Type 5 Impressions

2010-01-09T07:09:59Z

It seemed like forever between the time MT5 was released in Japan at the end of November until it was just released in the U.S. We found out the day after, because of a security update to both MT 4.33 and MT 5, but they wouldn't tell us that.

Telling us it was due to "wanting more time for coordination of the release and associated documentation" was frankly bull shit. Sorry guys. There still is hardly any documentation, scouring FogBugz seems to have offered the best loot so far. MT5 was released 4 days ago, and I still cannot lookup information on mt:Websites tag or the parent/child/sibling modifiers, for example. The mt:BlogParentWebsite is another tag I would like to know more about, too.

Come on guys, I thought you were putting a big effort into developing better documentation.
I have been testing out the betas of MT5 for a while now, so am well aware of the major differences between MT4. I know that we cannot use MT5 right away for BG Views Network, as we rely on a great number of plugins and even features not yet in MT5. Actions and Motion are not part of MT5 (yet) for example.

Below is a list of what I like and don't like about what I have experienced with the final build. Now I am fully aware that some nut job is going to take my words and twist them around for personal gains, it happened before after all. Little piece of advice - don't be that nut job. I use the tool that is the best for the job at hand, that happens to be Movable Type.

Liked

New Website object is long overdue. It is a game changer for organization and coding alike.
Custom Fields for every object in the system, including Website, Blog, and Template. Blog level custom fields should have been there from the get-go in MT4. Setting custom fields on templates is also a time saver.
Revision history on everything. This is most welcome for template changes.
Batch Edit Entries, which was missing from the betas, is now back, thankfully!
They have made it very clear how entries/categories and pages/folders work together. Nothing has changed, it is just a much nicer way of displaying them.
Themes are an enormous update from template sets in MT4. I just wish there was better documentation on them so I did not have to reverse engineer the built in themes to develop an MT5 BG Views theme.
Assigning a sub-domain to a blog publish and document root is now easier than ever. It is a small tweak, but it is nice.
New Tool: Export Theme, which currently seems like the best option for designing your own theme. So there is no need for another TemplateExporter version.
While the Community template set still doesn't use the Facebook namespace by default, they have done a good job at restructuring some of the template modules, making them global instead of local.

Didn't Like

Would it have been that difficult to add Heading tags to the default Rich Text Editor? I know I can install others, but would it really have been too much to ask for a drop down menu of H tags?
Along the same lines, how about being able to toggle the window full screen for template editing? Yes, it is a bigger window, but the toggle would have been nice.
MT5 desperately needs a "Blog Mover" Tool at the System Overview level, especially because of the way MT4 is imported into MT5. This should not be that difficult to create, all the tool needs to do is offer a UI to manipulate the publishing and document root path of the blog.
We need a "Works with MT5" tag, or wiki page, or something started, that indicates what plugins work and do not work in MT5. This was done with MT4 and was very helpful.
Websites can only have pages, not entries. This is nice. But it is overly complicated when you just want a simple blog. Every Blog must be under a Website, and importing MT4 will produce just that, every blog inside its own Website.
I figured that MT5 would see the inclusion of native search support for Custom Fields. Currently the 3rd party CustomFieldSearch is the only solution for this.

I can't wait until I can upgrade BG Views Network to MT5, just for the new Website object alone. Being able to use the parent/child/sibling modifiers is going to be a boon for displaying data around the network.

I will keep this updated as I spend more and more time with the final version. Last updated 1/9/2010.