Privacy: Public Beta
At long last, I'm extremely glad to announce the public beta of Privacy, MT Protect's successor. I'd already talked about a few of the features but then suddenly never mentioned it again. The biggest reason was that after doing a few betas with the folks on ProNet, many, especially the folks at Apperceptive came forward with a bunch of great ideas. Today I'd like to highlight some of these new killer features.
Extensible authentication framework - a fancy way of saying you can use any login system with Privacy. Privacy comes with the password protection and OpenID authentication (this includes easy support for Typekey, LiveJournal and soon Vox) out of the box but this can easily be extended to include any other means of authentication. I have plans for creating plugins for Privacy that will allow you to use Google's and Yahoo's authentication - meaning you could simply enter a reader's yahoo username to an entry! Movable Type Enterprise users will be glad to know that LDAP is also supported out of the box. I hope to flesh out the developer docs over this beta period.
Extremely user-friendly - thanks to the advances made by Six Apart with the latest Movable Type 3.3x release, Privacy has become much easier to use:
- Automatic Installation - once you upload Privacy to your Movable Type installation, it will prompt you to finish the installation and will automatically upgrade your database (including migrating MT Protect users) as well as install the necessary files.
- Streamlined Privacy - a feature I'd already previously demo'd, the privacy settings for assets (such as entries) appear directly on the respective editing interface. So for example, whilst creating a new entry, you can also set it's privacy settings, a sharp change from MT Protect.
- Integrated Listings - MT Protect users will remember how difficult it was to get a list of entries that had been protected. Thankfully, Privacy now displays the privacy status of objects directly on the listing screens. For example, if you had a private entry, on the
Entriesscreen, this would be shown as a lock next to the entry's name.
Category Privacy - along with entries and blogs, Privacy now allows you to mark categories in Movable Type as private. The new inheritance settings then allows entries that are assigned to private categories to also be marked private.
Templating - I've already elaborated on this before. To get your templates working with MT Protect was hellish, with Privacy, you really only need to use the appropriate
MTPrivatetag!
Privacy has indeed been a long time in the making, in fact I spent the better part of 2006 on it. It has already gone through three beta cycles on ProNet but there may still be some bugs remaining so I'd recommend taking a full database backup before installing this plugin (MT Protect users, your data will - should - migrate peacefully!)
On it's release, Privacy will be a free plugin for personal users, supported by donations. Commercial and Enterprise users will be asked to purchase the appropriate license after a 30-day evaluation period.
So, grab the beta. I'd love to have your thoughts, concerns and bugs!
11 Comments
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MikeT said:
on Feb 11, 2007 11:54 PM | Reply
When I tried to install it on my blog, for some reason it kept sending me back to the upgrade page. I am currently using the latest version of MT Protect. I tried to remove that data from the database, but it still had the same problem. Could you post an overview of the requirements for upgrading from MT Protect?
ben c said:
on Feb 18, 2007 5:33 AM | Reply
Does the Privacy plug-in do anything with the RSS feeds? As far as I know, the only authenticated method for most RSS readers is via HTTP Authentication.... Does the Privacy plugin offer a way to tie some sort of http auth login to a user account s.t. feeds can be protected? I've long wanted to have a private weblog with finer-grained roles/rights management, but almost everyone who reads my blog uses the RSS feed, so it's mostly a moot point--no plugins deal with that problem AFAICT.
Arvind Satyanarayan said:
on Feb 18, 2007 10:31 AM | Reply
Ah whoops! I'd totally forgotten about protecting RSS feeds. I'll need to figure out the best way to do so - perhaps provide a template tag that will hide an entry if it is protected.
Purifieron said:
on Feb 24, 2007 6:27 PM | Reply
I am working to install it, and I think i love Extensible authentication framework the most.
Praveen Angyan said:
on Mar 3, 2007 12:33 PM | Reply
Definitely buying a commercial license as soon as it is released. We've got a couple of clients who've wanted this feature for about 6 months now.
Rogan Creswick said:
on Mar 22, 2007 4:29 AM | Reply
I just tried to install Privacy, and had some issues. I used plugin manager first, and after it threw an error (not uncommon for me -- I think there are issues with my install of plugin manage) I proceeded to the mt plugin page for my installation. Privacy was listed there along with the various authentication plugins, however, no checkbox was present on the entries "customize editor fields" window.
Thinking something broke due to pluginmanager, I tried disabling Privacy on the main plugin page. This essentially broke the MT install -- every new action resulted in this error:
Got an error: Can't locate object method "instance" via package "MT::Plugin::Privacy" at /var/www/rogue/ciscavate/movable-type/plugins/Privacy/ldap.pl line 38.
Jumping to a shell, I removed the plugins/Privace and mt-static/plugins/Privace directories created by plugin manager and installed Privacy manually. After doing so, I'm still unable to log in to the MT installation (due to the same error -- only the "Click here to login" page shows up when I visit my MT admin page.)
Thankfully, removing the plugins/Privacy directory restored the blog to working order, but I would like to use this plugin.
Thanks, Rogan
David said:
on Apr 19, 2007 8:45 AM | Reply
I love the blog that you have. I was wondering if you would link my blog to yours and in return I would do the same for your blog. If you want to, my site name is American Legends and the URL is:
www.americanlegends.info
If you want to do this just go to my blog and in one of the comments just write your blog name and the URL and I will add it to my site.
Thanks, David
C. said:
on Jun 10, 2007 5:22 PM | Reply
I seem to have installed Privacy correctly but I am still unable to protect any individual posts or categories. I'd like to have a "Personal" category of posts but can't seem to figure out exactly how to do this. I entered the MTPrivacy tag within the entry body and category div but I am never prompted to login to view the content. Is there a list of items I should make sure of in case I've missed something? Would you offer installations for a fee? I'd be willing to pay since this is a valuable tool!
Matt Carey said:
on Jul 15, 2007 3:11 PM | Reply
this looks great and will be perfect for a forthcoming project (will be buying a commercial license!). any news on when it will be fully released? will it be mt4 compatible?
Taylor said:
on Aug 24, 2007 12:38 AM | Reply
Just a suggestion on the protection of RSS -- give visitors to the site who have authenticated in an RSS feed unique to them with a parameter (rss.xml?id=0123456789ABCDE) intended only for them, for private consumption. Google Reader, and others, still don't support HTTP auth, but this is a foolproof (from the user's perspective) way to give them access, as long as they don't make the feed 'public' on their particular reader.
Also, do you expect to support CrossPoster integration, for example, with LiveJournal (friends groups)?
Looking forward to MT4 support!
Arvind Satyanarayan replied to Taylor's comment:
on Aug 24, 2007 6:37 AM | Reply
Hi Taylor, Oh boy I hadn't even thought of CrossPoster integration :) No, I won't be supporting it for a while yet, I'm working towards a first release of Privacy for MT4 before building these features on top!