Jun
6
Yesterday, Six Apart announced the long awaited beta release of Movable Type 4. The new release includes many new features including a new installation and upgrade wizard, more powerful template management tools, new default templates and themes, and a redesigned user interface that will simplify common tasks.
MT4 will also serve as a social media platform that enables businesses to create community-driven websites. Among the new community management features is the ability to give users the right to post, add and share rich text and media posts with photos, videos, and audio.
More importantly, Six Apart also launched the Movable Type Open Source Project, an initiative that will result in the release of an open source version of MT later this year. The new licensing model looks like it will be similar to MySQL where the paid version includes technical and product support from SixApart.
This is an important development because the new open sourced version could turn out to be an interesting alternative to the millions of bloggers who now use WordPress.
Popularity: 18% [?]
WOW … gotta check it out … I have a old movable account … i’ll let ya know what I think!
Darin
I would be interested to hear what you think. I’ve never used movable type but I was thinking about downloading the beta and checking it out this weekend.
The community features seem like a step in the right direction. One of the problems we’ve had with MT is poor caching, so we’d go down when we got hit hard by traffic to dynamically served pages. We could switch to static serving, but that leads to painfully slow rebuilds as the site gets larger.
I’m not sure if Six Apart can ever really bring Movable Type – and it’s other products – into the forefront again. They’ll really have to come up with an impressive feature set to do so.
The WordPress community is so large – developers are what make WordPress so great. Any feature you can think of can be implemented via a plugin after a few minutes of searching. There are thousands of themes available.
Even for enterprise customers, WordPress.com has proved that the WordPress platform can stand up to constant abuse.
Wordpress will remain in the lead until something completely new and innovative is released.
I use to use Movable Type religiously. Then around the time they released 3.0 I discovered WordPress. I recently downloaded the beta. Haven’t installed it yet, but from what I’m hearing it may make me come back over to MT.