Wow, I go off on a little business trip and miss all the foofoorah over Movable Type 4. Aside from being what sounds like a big rewrite with lots of new features and developer possibilities, interestingly enough it sounds like it’s being released as open source. It’s just entering beta now, but it all sounds promising enough.
With more than 50 new features, MT4 will enable you to quickly start a blog, easily manage entire blogging websites and better connect with your audience. Here are some of the ways we are making Movable Type better than ever:
Easy to set-up and use
You’ll be up and running in minutes with MT4’s easy set up. Once it’s installed, you’ll be prompted to select from dozens of new professionally designed default templates and themes, or to import blog content directly from another blog platform.
Enjoy all the power of rich media
MT4’s core authoring functions allows you to manage assets with greater ease. A rich web editor offers “What You See Is What You Get” functionality to allow insertion of not just text, but audio, photos, and files as well. And you can easily reuse any of those rich media assets with MT4’s new built-in asset management system.
Get a view of your blog’s success with the MT4 dashboard
Movable Type 4 offers a powerful summary of your blogging activity via a convenient single screen. Dynamic graphic displays let you see what’s happening with your blogs, which content and which contributors are driving conversations, and provides smart starting points for you to manage your site.
Create a dynamic website with powerful content management
MT4’s powerful templating system lets you output content in any format, without requiring any programming or scripting. You can create standalone pages that automatically inherit the design and layout of your blog, and publish any content with the new posting interface, including rich media.
Let your readers join the conversation
MT4 now offers a powerful built-in registration system, letting you use your own authentication for commenters and users – giving you greater control over who posts what. It’s easy to integrate authentication with other platforms and services through OpenID, the industry-standard single sign-on system pioneered by Six Apart and currently deployed for over 100 million sites.
View multiple blogs on one website, with easy archiving
With the MT aggregator, you can now easily pull posts from some or all of your blogs into one page for easy viewing. You can present those blogs in even more ways, with expanded options for archiving content by date, organizing content by category or tag, and archiving blog content by author.
Of course, it’s a swing back in the other direction from the ill-fated revamp of the licensing with the release of MT3 back in 2004. Not only did that whole event drive off a lot of MT’s supporters (and blogs) to other platforms (like WordPress), it also began to spell a series lack of focus for SixApart — which became distracted by the split between MT3 and MT3 Enterprise, plus TypePad, plus the LiveJournal acquisition, plus Vox.
The question becomes — where is MT actually going? If it’s being dropped into open source with v4, does that mean that 6A will thereafter just be focusing on their pay services (see above), while the community is supposed to carry on with MT? Can MT re-garner enough community support to vie with WP and other systems?
For that matter, will MT4 and MT Open Source be (after the beginning) different forks of development? MTOS will be based on MT4 — but how much the two of them will continue to resemble each other after that is unclear. There’s some positive feedback from some former MT critics, negative from others, and too much seems based on emotion than on rational thinking. I’m sure there will be more discussion (hopefully lucid) on this over the coming months.