Say my name
Jonathon reminds me of something I noticed, agitated about for a while, and then dropped: Movable Type’s handling of author names could use some rethinking. The default MT template for RSS 0.91 skates around the problem by having an empty webMaster element, but the RSS 1.0 template includes <dc:creator><$MTEntryAuthor encode_xml="1"$></dc:creator> for each item. Since MTEntryAuthor is replaced with your MT username (the name you use to log in), you may very well be advertising what you think of as a secret in your RSS.
The best solutions for now: for a single-user blog, just replace the <$MTEntryAuthor encode_xml="1"$> with your name, and for a multiuser blog replace it with <$MTEntryAuthorNickname encode_xml="1"$> and add nicknames that are the authors’ full names to every author’s profile.
Longterm, I think that MT needs to decouple the username from the MTEntryAuthor tag. It wouldn’t be that hard to make the transition (I’m more than willing to pile this amount of work on Ben): add another field to the author profile page and the database for author name, and populate it with the login name for existing authors. Newly created authors can choose a secret login and then add their full name during the creation process, and existing authors who want to change will be able to do so.
Long-term, MT needs to rethink the Add/Edit Blog Authors menu. It’s cumbersome, and needs more finely tuned permissions (like ability to edit *certain* templates, and change *certain* configurations, not all of them). User groups with predefined permissions for each would be a nice addition as well. I might bring it up on the support boards.
You might find my Nickname Link plugin handy. It does the same thing as MTEntryAuthorLink, but uses the nickname instead of the login name.
I have found the MTEntryAuthorNickname tag to be useful whenever I was running a group blog. I just think it might have been better to have had it implemented as the default in the templates.
Richard, the level of permissions you’re asking for doesn’t come off as easy.
It would involve defining default permissions for each template when you create it.
It’s fine and dandy to apply template/config-permissions once you got your blog completely set up and not going to have templates additions anymore, but once you add a template what will you do? Do you say the template is editable by no-one until you have visited the Authors’ section, or that it’s editable by anyone by default?