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June 5, 2007

Movable Type 4.0 Beta Launches, Platform To Be Open Sourced

Duncan Riley

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mt.pngSixApart have released a new beta version of popular blogging content management system Movable Type.

Moveable Type 4.0 is the first major release of Movable Type since MT 3.0 in 2004 and comes complete with a market disrupting announcement: SixApart will open source Movable Type before the end of the third quarter.

I spoke to SixApart’s Vice President Anil Dash prior to the launch and he explained that SixApart sees the move to an open source Movable Type as going back to SixApart’s roots.

There’s a lot of history between MT users and SixApart. Although Movable Type was never an open source platform, prior to the release of MT 3.0 many treated MT as if it was open source. The decision to enforce licensing with the release of MT 3.0 caused widespread outrage in 2004 (including rather vocally from myself) and in many ways was a tipping point that delivered WordPress from relative obscurity to being the popular blogging CMS it is today.

Dash said that commercially SixApart had no choice other than to enforce licensing at the time. However SixApart in 2007 is a thriving company with a broad suite of popular products, including TypePad, Vox and LiveJournal, and today can afford to give back to the blogging community.

The new version of Movable Type is a radical departure from previous versions.

MT4 includes more than 50 new features including a new installation and upgrade wizard, easier and more powerful template management tools that speed site development, all new default templates and themes, and a completely redesigned user interface focused on streamlining common tasks.

MT4 as social media platform allows users to turn their readers into communities through Movable Type’s new community management features, with the ability to give users the right to post, add and share rich text and media posts with photos, videos, and audio. MT4 also includes a new ratings framework that enables a variety of recommendation features.

Scalability is dramatically improved with built in support for database caching through Data::Object Driver and Memcached, incorporating technology that powers Vox, LiveJournal and TypePad, as well as Web 2.0 sites including AOL, Microsoft, Digg, Wikipedia, Craigslist and Facebook.

The new licensing model once MT 4 is opened source will be similar to MySQL, the paid version will include technical and product support from SixApart.

I have a long history with SixApart that isn’t worth repeating here. As a vocal critic previously I can now say in all honesty that a leopard can change its spots. The new version of MovableType looks wildly appealing to me as a blogger and the decision to open source the platform may well deliver broad numbers of WordPress converts back to the platform that started it all. The open sourced version of MT 4.0 will also offer a strong alternative to the millions of WordPress users who never grew up in blogging using MovableType.

mt1.png

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 5th, 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Anil

    June 5th, 2007 at 12:10 am

    Thanks for taking the time to look at what we’ve been working on, Duncan. One of the things I’m most excited about is that we’re doing a real, old-fashioned beta, where the feedback from users will actually affect how features evolve, but at the same time there won’t be an endless beta — we’ll have a final product that reflects the suggestions that come in. I’m looking forward to seeing what people think of what the team has done so far.

    Plus, it’s got that big serious-looking black header up top. That’s how you can tell it’s Serious Business. :)

  2. David Krug

    June 5th, 2007 at 12:11 am

    It’s about time. Really all I have to say.

  3. Duncan Riley

    June 5th, 2007 at 12:24 am

    Anil
    thanks for dropping by and apologies, I should have added that this is a strict beta, it’s not a final release and you did say that to me. I guess I’m still just stoked that SixApart is open sourcing the platform. Krug chimes in that it’s about time and I could argue that, but at the same time it’s better late than never and I know many people will be welcoming MT to the open source community.

  4. Scott Yang

    June 5th, 2007 at 12:28 am

    Thanks 6A. It is great to see the platform that made the self-hosted blogs popular in the first place going open source. All the best!

    What is going to be the license?

  5. Anil

    June 5th, 2007 at 12:31 am

    Scott, MT OS will be under a GPL license, the same as LiveJournal and much of our other code. It’ll be a dual-license similar to MySQL or something like that.

  6. Juuso

    June 5th, 2007 at 1:07 am

    Looking nice, interesting to see what Wordpress has to say about this.

  7. SELaplana

    June 5th, 2007 at 1:14 am

    when i tried to use MT last 2005, i was asked to pay an amount in exchange of download. so, i decided to use wordpress which is free.

    based on the review above, i found MT is more interesting blogging software. but i am wondering if it’s really a user friendly one just like the Wordpress.

  8. Duncan Riley

    June 5th, 2007 at 1:28 am

    SELaplana
    One of my own personal gripes (the pay side), but like you I’m keen to try the new version

  9. Ali

    June 5th, 2007 at 1:44 am

    When I first ventured into blogging, I was looking at MT and thought why do I need to pay for this? That’s how I chanced upon WordPress, now that MT is going Open Source I might just give it a try.

    Really excited about this. I just hope the customization is as flexible as WP.

  10. Jesse Gardner

    June 5th, 2007 at 1:53 am

    The install on MT 4.0 is grand. It does everything for you, the way it should.

    But let me tell you, my favorite part is that the same templating engine that powers the front end now builds the back end to. Think about that one for a minute… In other words, if you know how to use MT template tags to create a blog, you’ve already got the tools to customize the backend.

    I can’t wait to see the ways everyone uses this!

  11. Su

    June 5th, 2007 at 2:15 am

    Your content’s being republished. Thought you’d like to know. The image is even being hotlinked. Lovely.

  12. Duncan Riley

    June 5th, 2007 at 2:25 am

    Thanks Su

  13. Joel Haasnoot

    June 5th, 2007 at 2:46 am

    Todd Cochrane of Geek News Central ought to be happy - he’s staid with MovableType and has hated it I think because there were no updates :)

  14. Lucian

    June 5th, 2007 at 2:59 am

    Finally! I was beginning to look like a stupid fanboy for sticking to MT. Can’t wait to try it out and spread the word.

  15. Andy

    June 5th, 2007 at 4:17 am

    Open source codebase? Pages? Come on.p.. Aren’t these all features that WordPress added years ago?

    I would expect more critical commentary rather than reprinting the press release. I don’t say that to be insulting, literally this sentence: Techcrunch: “Scalability is dramatically improved … Web 2.0 sites including AOL, Microsoft, Digg, Wikipedia, Craigslist and Facebook.” From the press release: “MT4 leverages open technologies developed at Six Apart that help scale and build community in Vox, LiveJournal and TypePad, as well as Web 2.0 sites from AOL, Microsoft, Digg, Wikipedia, Craigslist and Facebook.”

    Coincidentally, WordPress built-in object cache support memcache, APC, and other backends so they could add Wordpress.com to that lits as well.

    A last-gasp attempt of a dying product to appear cool and catch-up to the rest of the industry (see also: Weebly, Squarespace, Expression Engine) doesn’t warrant this type of fawning coverage.

  16. Duncan Riley

    June 5th, 2007 at 4:22 am

    Andy
    if you knew my history with SixApart you wouldn’t have written that. “Fawning coverage” as a phrase is bizarre, trust me when I say that I wouldn’t have written this if I wasn’t convinced.

  17. Steve

    June 5th, 2007 at 4:44 am

    I applaud this move! I do believe that most of the features in MT4 are already available via wordpress, although I think it would be cool to have them bundled together rather than hunting for plugins and trying to get templates, plugins and everything to work the way they need to in order to have all this functionality. I will have to refamiliarize myself with MT (it’s been a while).

    I think this release will be good for bloggers and communities / communitcation as a whole, if less tech savvy people can get a good cms and make it easy to manipulate, it will spawn more open communication. I also think it will spawn more people to use the “contributor registrations” and such in wordpress to mimick the MT4 look and functionality. (assuming it looks good and is intuitive, as I suspect it will be)

    Kudos to MT for going open source, this should be beneficial to all.

  18. Su

    June 5th, 2007 at 5:23 am

    If this was fawning, I’d be interested in seeing what Andy calls most comments on any given Wordpress release. (Before the all-too-common site-destroying bugs start getting discovered, anyway.) Duncan has been more than critical enough of MT in the past, my disagreements notwithstanding, that the observation really is pretty bizarre.

  19. w

    June 5th, 2007 at 6:02 am

    This will push Wordpress to get even better…

  20. Concrete Stain

    June 5th, 2007 at 6:56 am

    This brings them to - par for the everyday user with wordpress …

    -RB

  21. billg

    June 5th, 2007 at 7:22 am

    Andy, adding pages to MT, or any other blogging platform, actually, is just a matter of generating an HTML file and linking to it. There’s your page. It’s only when people want to do something as simple as that within the confines of their blogging platform that things begin to get gummed up.

    I’ve walked away from WP and MT to Expression Engine but would seriously consider a move back to MT if they’ve cleaned up its use of FastCGI. I used it with lighttpd and thought it was leaking memory.

    That said, I think one of the unspoken selling points of WP or any other similar platforms is they allow site redesigns to be applied much more conveniently than in MT. If, as most do, you use static pages with MT, then a redesign requires bebuilding every page on the site. Nonprofessionals who like to play with their design and try out different themes might be unhappy with that.

    On the other hand, if they’re on a shared host, they will always run the risk of spiking their host’s MySQL limits, which is unlikely to happen with a MT.

  22. David Dalka

    June 5th, 2007 at 7:23 am

    Nice. Do the trackback spam filters work on 4.0?

  23. Josh

    June 5th, 2007 at 8:09 am

    I just upgraded and the HTML of the application is all screwed up. Mine does not look anything like that nice screen shot above.

  24. Amit

    June 5th, 2007 at 8:12 am

    Great article, but when can we start playing around with the beta? I went to MT’s site, but the beta isn’t available yet for download.

  25. Dan

    June 5th, 2007 at 8:28 am

    I started using MT when it was free back in the day. I too was put off when they started charging for it (plus the fact that it was a pain to install!). From there I went to WordPress and have been loving it.

    But…

    Now that they have addressed my 2 major issues (price and installation) I will be checking out the beta.

  26. Matt Brian

    June 5th, 2007 at 8:40 am

    Looks nice, although I don’t think I would change from the great service my Wordpress blog has provided.

  27. Chris Alden

    June 5th, 2007 at 9:53 am

    The beta is available for download now at http://www.movabletype.org. If by chance you are being redirected to movabletype.com it may be a DNS propagation issue that should resolve soon.

  28. Mike Rundle

    June 5th, 2007 at 10:52 am

    Anil this looks fantastic, the new user interface is already light years past what goes for an “admin interface” over in WordPress land. For the past few years I’ve been writing about MT and what I thought it would take to go back to how things were, and I think this is a huge step in the right direction. You guys rock.

  29. Sean

    June 5th, 2007 at 10:57 am

    Very much looking forward to this. For a while there I was starting to think I might have missed the boat by not migrating to Wordpress, I’m hoping you guys prove me wrong.

  30. Kevin Burton

    June 5th, 2007 at 11:03 am

    Yeah…. a few years too late I think. Great to see innovation but they’re really going to have trouble moving the developer community from Wordpress to Moveable Type.

    Wordpress is even making significant gains against Typepad in the hosted market as well.

  31. Kevin Burton

    June 5th, 2007 at 11:04 am

    ……. oh… but would love to be proven wrong :)

  32. Andrew

    June 5th, 2007 at 11:52 am

    Duncan, do you really think that prodigal bloggers will return to MT from WP? Nothing I see in your post seems to provide compelling reason for them to do so.

  33. d

    June 5th, 2007 at 12:02 pm

    This is great news but…. when will they fix Typepad? We’ve seen a Vox rollout and now an MT upgrade.

    Typepad is a great product but there have been lots of performance issues and there’s still very basic functionality missing. It’s 2007 and there’s *still* no way to put a simple “See Previous Entries” link at the bottom of your page. C’mon guys… Pagination should be a standard feature on every blog platform (and in fact exists on Blogger.com, Wordpress.com and everywhere else EXCEPT for Typepad).

  34. Peter Figueredo

    June 5th, 2007 at 12:26 pm

    Is it me or does this new layout look very similar to http://www.cj.com ?

  35. Peter Figueredo

    June 5th, 2007 at 12:32 pm

    here is a screen shot of CJ.com
    http://superaffiliatehandbook.com/images/cj.gif

  36. Lawrence Krubner

    June 5th, 2007 at 1:24 pm

    Isn’t MT written in Perl? Perl seems like an ugly language for dealing with web software.

  37. Jeffrey

    June 5th, 2007 at 1:39 pm

    I will use MT in my upcoming blog.

    It’s beneficial for any person to try other platforms so he will know which works better or not.

  38. Su

    June 5th, 2007 at 1:45 pm

    Peter, yes it’s you. Is there a point to you harping on this?

    Lawrence: Yes, it’s Perl(with dynamic publishing handled by PHP). It’s worked this long for web software. What exactly are you getting at?

  39. Martin Kelley

    June 5th, 2007 at 2:06 pm

    Thank goodness! Most of the websites I’ve developed over the last few years have had a MT base and frankly I’ve been wondering whether I bet on the wrong horse. I love MT and the flexibility it has but it’s felt like it’s been largely stalled out in limbo-land while 6A focused elsewhere (I’ve gotten most depressed when I’ve seen how few styles are available, esp. compared with all the Wordpress options). I hope this helps bring back the developer geeks. Thanks 6A!

  40. tiagón

    June 5th, 2007 at 2:25 pm

    those are really great news. Been working with MT for more than 3 years I guess - and the sotfware is so reliable that I (almost superstitiously) fear trying anything else. but I can’t wait to test the beta, and see the changes on installation process. this could be really painful in some cases.

  41. Mihai Bocsaru

    June 5th, 2007 at 3:52 pm

    I’ve been anxious to be among the first around the world to evaluate this project. Movable Type surprised me from the very first second.

    For those of you interested on evaluating this new product without taking the time to install it on on your side, I’ve installed and made publicly
    available a demo version.

    Go and enjoy it at: http://www.movabletype4.org/

    Many thanks to the great crew @ Six Apart and to the entire Movable Type Community for your continuous support on further improving this excellent publishing platform!

  42. Rebort

    June 5th, 2007 at 5:03 pm

    Curious strategy .. why “open source” now?

    The MT4 “Open Source” page seems to imply that there will be two different versions of the product — as in two different branches — not just a “open” version and a commercial “support” version.

    After creating Wordpress’ marketshare with bad v3 licensing, 6A seemed to abandon its flagship product. (Three years between releases? Ick.)

    Try and explain the difference between LiveJournal, Typepad, Vox, and MT to your closest non-nerd friend. The company feels like it has lacked focus lately.

    In a post-Twitter environment, MT4 seems like vicious overkill.

  43. Greg

    June 5th, 2007 at 7:00 pm

    Not to highlight my own ignorance, but whoa, MT is written in Perl? That’s actually pretty awesome. I’m still a PHP guy at heart, but Perl is amazingly useful in a lot of cases.

  44. Su

    June 5th, 2007 at 7:19 pm

    as in two different branches — not just a “open” version and a commercial “support” version.
    As I understand from a conference call earlier today, exactly what the open source version will be isn’t settled yet, and will be worked out as a part of the community work itself. Don’t read into this until you see an actual statement. But yes, one difference will be official support for the commercial product.

    Three years between releases?
    You make it sound as if there have been no releases at all, much less major ones(3.2 and 3.3x), in a solid three years. You are wrong. MT4 was originally going to be 3.4 until the changes apparently started piling up too high. Version numbers are marketing tools. Features are what matter, and plenty has happened in that time.

    In a post-Twitter environment, MT4 seems like vicious overkill.
    I have no idea what that’s even supposed to mean.

  45. Gita

    June 5th, 2007 at 8:43 pm

    Wow. No point repeating what’s already been said. I echo Martin Kelley’s comment, pretty much to the letter. Just… wow. I am so totally psyched.

  46. Anthony

    June 6th, 2007 at 12:07 am

    You have to wonder if Matt Mullenwegg’s success with Wordpress.com helped push Mena and company in this direction, since it showed a model for making money, while making a successful publishing platform open-source.

  47. Miko

    June 6th, 2007 at 2:16 am

    This is extremely interesting. I guessed that Six Apart’s panicky pedophile witch-hunt to prevent bad publicity at the end of May was driven by a major event. This could be it. The timing sure is right.

  48. erinther

    June 6th, 2007 at 4:42 am

    “Curious strategy .. why “open source” now?
    The MT4 “Open Source” page seems to imply that there will be two different versions of the product — as in two different branches — not just a “open” version and a commercial “support” version.     ”
    here is a Athena Component Plan
    I think open source version will include only a few of these components.

  49. Erick P

    June 19th, 2007 at 6:46 am

    Hi. I wonder what the brouhaha is about. Where truly are these “dozens of new features” other than a horizontal top navigation layout that looks like WP’s, and a Flash file ‘dashboard’ with text in ugly 8 point tahoma?

    I do not see one new feature. User management is the same, rebuilding is now called republishing, entries are the same, display options are the same, templating is the same….hooh, this is tiring.

    Where is custom field possibility that would make us take MT seriously? MT 4 has only broken the two endeavors in that area — CustomFields and RightFields, the authors of both of which are scrambling to update their excellent software.

    This three-year pending update may make sense to people who have been used to seeing the age-old MT admin interface, but to people who have experimented with alternatives, this is nothing home to write about.

  50. Alden

    June 20th, 2007 at 6:02 pm

    Hmm, the black header looks a bit harsh, but the fonts look all right - when I heard they were going to use larger fonts in the back end, I had flashes of Wordpress and its Play-School-sized text.

  51. Movable Type Consulting

    June 28th, 2007 at 8:01 am

    Movable Type v4.0 is available for online checking

    A full featured version is continuously updated, any time a new version comes out

    Go, check it out and discover how powerful and simple to use the Movable Type Athena project is

    http://www.movabletype4.org/

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