Ideally, authors of blogs should have automatic commenting approval, or have such a permission which could be enabled for multi-author blogs -- i.e., authors should be pre-authenticated for leaving comments on blogs which require authentication for comments, via their MT login.

I've always wondered why this wasn't a given, already.

Additionally, having custom-uploadable image tags to show the special authentication (like the TypeKey or OpenID images now available and displayed by the commenter name.)

Also, the OpenID Server plugin should be part of the core system for authors of blogs, with convenient MT tags for embedding the necessary information on any MT-built page used as the OpenID id. (I suppose having the OpenID Commenting plugin a part of the core would be good too!)

Plus, it'd be nice to have Arvind's cool Custom Authors feature of Custom Fields integrated into the core, for author archiving and creating author profile pages, etc.

Finally, having the ability to embed information in pages viewed by logged-in authors display only for those authors would be good -- like the "edit post" link now only available on the search pages.

Wow. Where to begin.

First - thank you so much for the feedback. It is so nice to get such detailed, specific and directed feedback. I am not sure if you have heard of Project Athena, but it is the next major version of Movable Type and it has a number of features you are talking about. For example:

* commenter authentication
* custom authentication options via OpenID - register your open OpenID endpoints and images
* built in author archives

The last request you make is already possible - if you publish PHP pages, or if you don't mind writing javascript, it is easy to create those links for the authors themselves based upon their user cookie. But you are right, we should probably start a project to generate some cool more dynamic PHP-based blog templates. Could be really interested what people come up with.

Byrne Reese
Product Manager, Movable Type

Byrne,

Thanks for the quick feedback!

I'm looking forward to Project Athena (although, as usual, a bit worried about support for old plugins...).

I'm wondering if the commenter authentication in Athena includes automatic authentication for the authors of blogs? That was my central thought.

Plus, know any good tutorial or code out there for handling the last item on the list, using the author cookies to display info only they see?