Six Apart rolls out beta of Movable Type 4
Six Apart is revamping its leading Movable Type blogging software and turning it into a componentized platform with new enterprise and social media capabilities. I talked to Chris Alden, executive vice president and general manager of Movable Type, about the new version, MT 4, which is being rolled out in beta this week as a free download and is expected to go into general release in Q3.
"Today Movable Type is two product lines--Movable Type 3 the five-year-old platform and and Movable Type Enterprise 1.5. We are merging the two, all of version 3 and some of version 1.5 into Movable Type 4, and adding some core technology from the company's hosted platforms, Vox, LiveJournal and TypePad," Alden said.
Among the new features are an improved installer and importing tool; a vastly redesigned user interface; a new WYSIWYG editor inherited from Vox and support for OpenID. The beta also supports local authentication and registration for commenters, spam fighting controls, aggregation of posts from multiple blogs and asynchronous publishing capabilities. In addition, Six Apart is positioning Movable Type as Web site and content management system, expanding beyond blogs, Alden said.
Movable Type 4 has a componentized archictecture, and the company plans to announce "feature packs" to fill out functionality, such as one for enterprise integration, deploying the platform with LDAP directories and enabling policy-based management, and working with high-end databases. Another feature pack will integrate social networking features. "We are looking at the changing roles of writers and readers, and will enable readers to vote, guest post and have own their own profiles," Alden said. The feature packs won't be announced until June 19 at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston.
The feature pack approach, incrementally adding features without a major reboot, and creating an ecosystem of developers using the APIs will be a critical factor in Six Apart being able to maintain its best of breed blogging platform status. The company will face off (or get acquired by) larger companies--Microsoft, Oracle, and others--that are building blogging, wikis and social media functions into their own platforms. In addition, on-premises competitors such as Blogtronix provide a more comprehensive suite of social media capabilities for enterprises.
Six Apart also creating a fully open sourced version of Movable Type 4, likely based on the GPL, in addition to a commercial version with a proprietary license. "We will have a dual license, similar to MySQL," Alden said. "We want to get developers cranked up and distribute through open source stacks. It's about broadening the base of users."