Six Apart has today announced the commercial release of Movable Type 4, just over two months since it was launched as a beta. MT4 is now the main product on the Movable Type homepage, replacing 3.x. Billed as “the largest release in the productÄôs history”, MT4 has new community management features and a completely re-designed admin platform. It also incorporates many of the most popular and downloaded plugins. Boing Boing will be one of the first major blogs to use MT4 and Read/WriteWeb is also undergoing a re-design using MT4.
Also released today is a re-designed plug-ins directory, using the new black theme of MT4 and some new plugins that work with MT4 – including, interestingly, an Akismet plugin (the spam filtering plugin developed for wordpress by Six Apart’s arch-rivals Automattic). All of the documentation regarding MT4 can be found here.
The open sourcing of MT4 is slated for Q3 2007. Movable Type Open Source, or MTOS, is the open source project that will consist of a GPL-licensed version of Movable Type 4.0. Once that is released, Movable Type will be at least as attractive as WordPress as a publishing platform for bloggers.
In terms of features in MT4, Anil Dash told me that “in a feature-for-feature comparison, i think we’re well ahead. There are so many things built in to MT [4] that require plugins in other platforms – tags, static pages, multiple blog support, a media manager; any one of those needs a plugin in other platforms but is native in MT4.”
Demo of new interface
More details on features
As we noted in June, MT4 boasts over 50 new features and “a completely redesigned user interface”, which includes a more advanced WYSIWYG editor and a system dashboard with dynamic graphic display. MT4 is also pushing itself as “a social media platform”, which allows users to turn their audiences into communities. In effect this means that readers can become members of a website, with rights to post alongside authors – including sharing photos, videos, and audio. There is also a new ratings framework.
MT4 also promises more down-to-earth functionality, like improvements in fighting blog spam. There will be a number of technical improvements, such as database caching through Memcached and authenticating of users with OpenID. MT4 also brings a new component-based architecture, which unifies its commercial and enterprise product lines “while enabling advanced capabilities with optional functionality packs”.
