Content Management Matters ™

Originally scheduled for release Monday May 19, the newest release of Movable Type v4.15 is now planned for Wednesday May 28, 2008. Why the delay? They say all will become clear on release day. Until then, here are the enhancements in store for all you Movable Type users.

San Francisco-based Six Apart -- makers of Movable Type, sellers of Live Journal -- have just unwrapped a lovely new piece of technology. Some call it blog fire-hosing, but we'll go with rather heavier metaphors and say their new Blog It FaceBook app is double barrel publishing fun. It's buckshot blogging. It's strafing the blogosphere. It's like going hunting with Cheney -- you know, pull the trigger once and you get two birds and all your friends, right in the face.

Movable Type, on it's trek towards full fledged CMS'ness, just got a little closer. Today saw Mark Carey's announcement of MT Forum -- a MT add-on module which delivers fully functional forums that are loosely based on the behavior of the popular phpBB system.

Does this addition bump the MT Community Solution -- the other way to build forums with MT -- off the table? Let's have a look.

Webware, C|Net's Web 2.0 blog-monkey, has launched the second annual Webware 100 poll. There are awards and there are awards, but popular voting awards under the C|Net banner are worth noticing. With half a million votes from Web users last time around, we will watch developments here with interest.

There is a wide range of categories to vote in including Audio, Browsing, Productivity and Video; but the battles we are primarily interested in will be conducted in the "Publishing and Photography" category.

The gang at Six Apart has just announced a new extension for their Movable Type 4.1 Commercial and Open Source publishing platforms. It's called the the Action Streams Plugin and by tying together data from all manner of social networking providers it moves you one step closer to the open social web dream.

It's official, Moveable Type Open Source (MTOS) 4.1 Stable has been released to the market.

We've been keeping you up to date about MTOS since we heard about it in August. In December we gave you an overview of the new open source version.

It was just last week that MT4.1 RC1 was released. So the guys and gals over at Six Apart are moving fast.

It was a gray winter morning in CMSland and here's how we decided to spend it: we packed down a block of fresh soda bread and headed over to Chez Technorati to have a gander at their 100 most linked-to (popular) blogs. With that list in hand we skipped about through viewed source, many emails and some kindly conversation. In the end we had ourselves a nifty little list consisting of website name and the blogging technology or Web CMS platform said site ran on.

Simply put, we found that WordPress dominates the list, that Movable Type comes in with a respectable second, and the rest are either custom jobbies or a smattering of other platforms which are, relatively speaking, eating dust. We enclose the full list here for your consideration, but first a couple of notes on the results.

It's official. Movable Type v4.1 has taken another definitive step toward production. This means the real deal is not far away. There are a few changes from the beta release, but for the most part -- she's looking fit.

Hello. Open source blogging fanatics, it's your day. Coming full-circle-ish -- and probably well timed for the Le Web 3 event in Paris -- Six Apart has just released an open source version of Movable Type. It's called Movable Type Open Source, MTOS for short, and it is just the latest chapter in the continuing story of a company that strives towards the old adage "Power to the People."

Our coverage of the Executing Social Media Conference continues as Dan Greenfield presents the Five Immutable Laws of Corporate Blogging and Alicia Dorset shares a corporate blogging case study for one of the largest companies in the world.

Six Apart told CMSWire a couple of weeks ago that blogging had evolved, and now we know what they meant.

The creators of the MovableType and TypePad blogging platforms today release Movable Type Community Solution (MTCS), a commercial product which enables the building of social media communities.

Having done its bit to kick-start the blogging revolution with the creation of Movable Type 1.0 back in 2001, 6A's new 'MySpace in a Box' solution aims to revolutionize the blogosphere once more by offering everyone the ability to create their own social networking site.

This week saw an event that somewhat mystified a number of us. When WordPress was awarded Packt Press' Best [Open Source] Social Networking Web CMS this past Monday there were a fair few of you scratching your heads.

WordPress, a social networking platform? Hmm.

Actually, most folks think of WordPress as a blogging platform. And then, when a lot of us hear the word WordPress, we also think of Movable Type and ExpressionEngine. These too are most often considered blogging platforms, or in terms of the CMSWire topic taxonomy, micro cms platforms.

Now with the three projects being arch competitors, we do enjoy stirring up a bit of the respective camps' enthusiasm by presenting things like head-to-head comparisons (here, here, and here). But that's not what we doing today.

The blogosphere is, as usual, evolving. Web publishing is transforming. And the nature of publishers' interaction with the public has dramatically shifted. With a troubling lack of grace we've attempted to capture the conceptual elements of these changes in that Web 2.0 basket.

The Web 2.0 thing has had a big impact on the CMS world. More traditional Enterprise Web CMS projects have been pulled down into the micro CMS world, rapidly. And all those suddenly vital functions previously only found in blogging platforms have pulled the micro CMS crowd into the enterprise. This has all not been what I'd call a match made in heaven, but it has been fun and a little dramatic to observe.

During a recent visit to the Six Apart offices in San Francisco, we had a chance to pick the brains of one of the fine gentlemen sitting in the eye of this storm. Byrne Reese is the lead product manager for Movable Type. He's the person primarily responsible for the release of Movable Type 4, and has been intimately involved in what's now called the Movable Type Community Solution. Byrne is presently heads-down on the open source version of Movable Type (MTOS). As perhaps only a consequence of timing, MTOS' unhatched state prevented it from being considered in Packt's recent contest.

Nevertheless, if WordPress is to be labeled a leading Social Networking platform, then it bears mentioning that products like MT are angling quite aggressively in that same direction. I'll stop typing there and let Byrne take the next 3 minutes of your time explaining how and why the blogosphere is transforming from streams of thought to clusters of participants.

Once upon a time, in a TCP packet not far from here there was no blogosphere. A web-based journal was not known as a blog, or for that matter known much at all, not to mentioned considered a sane spend of one's precious time.

Back then internauts given to verbosity had to either hack their own blogging platform together or nag a nerd to do it for them. My, how times have changed. And now we have so many choices.

Jesse Gardner of PlasticMind Design (and a serious MT fan) has just put out a punch list detailing why, in his plastic mind, Movable Type 4.0 trumps WordPress 2.3 when it comes to features, the pleasure of ownership and the pains of maintenance.

Now even citizen bloggers can get all Web 2.0'ed out. MT-Hacks, a resource for all your eyebrow-raising Movable Type plugin needs, has just launched an AJAX-powered comments system. It is called Ajax Comments.