Under the code.sixapart developer site, there's a repository of plugins that many people are likely not aware of. Some of the plugins are outdated or still in development, but there are also a few goodies that have just never been packaged up for release. To get at these either involves checking the code out with a Subversion client, browsing through the directories while downloading each file and recreating the structure on your own machine, or an only slightly less-tedious URL hack.

I've had to do this a few times recently and got sick of the effort involved, so in the interest of laziness(and boredom), mashed together a bookmarklet to automate the URL hack: Plugin Repo Download. To use, just activate it at the top-level directory of any given plugin, like so for HelloWorld.
It's not smart enough to work its way back up there if you're already browsing down into a plugin's structure. I gave it a quick try and decided I didn't think it especially important, but might come back to that at a later date.

As far as compatibility, the bookmarklet works in Firefox 2.x, which is all that really matters to me at the moment. There's nothing so involved that it shouldn't also work in any reasonably current browser, but I haven't tested and probably won't have much inclination to do anything about it if a problem does turn up.

Mark Cary dresses MT in WordPress drag. But was it an entirely good idea? Go read->

Beau Smith has released a first version of DashOff, which provides something like an even further compressed take on what Arvind's My Blogs widget does, though with some extra options: The blog listing can be sorted by name, creation or last update, and item counts can be toggled on or off.

I haven't been able to get this working in my 4.1b3 installation, but it's fine on an early svn build and also 4.01, so it's probably due to some of the interface changes that are underway.

A mandatory security update was released today, bumping version numbers to either 3.36 or 4.01-a, depending what series you're in. A patched file is also available for any 3.2 users that remain.

The issue itself isn't too likely and hasn't been discovered in the wild, but it's always a good idea to apply any security patches, of course. Full details available in the official announcement.

Dan's released a small update for the popular Better File Uploader which fixes a display glitch in the 4.1 preview. Wouldn't hurt to install it anyway with 4.01 anyway.

MT4.1 will introduce a new container tag, SetVars (plural), for easily doing multiple variable assignments in "key=value" pair format. With the heavy use of SetVar in the latest version of the default templates, I guess the engineers got sick of typing MTSetVar over and over.

For a quick demonstration, paste the following into an index template of your test installation of the 4.1beta or MTOS code, and rebuild:

<MTSetVars>
foo=one
baz=2
</MTSetVars>
<p>The value of variable "foo" is: <$MTGetVar name="foo"$></p>
<p>The value of variable "bar" is: <$MTGetVar name="baz"$></p>

(No, it wasn't always open source. But you knew that, right?)

The MTOS project officially launches today. Read Anil's announcement post for some details, grab the first nightly build and start playing. Note that this is beta code, as it leads directly into the release of MT4.1, codenamed "Boomer."

I'll be posting on some of the new tags and changes over the next few days after doing a bit more rummaging around in the template code.

A pretty level-headed overview at web-strategist.com.

I can't imagine why.

Continuing his recent barage of MT projects, Mark's put together a dashboard widget to give you some information on your memcached system.