Six Apart News & Articles

We've said it before and we'll say it again: Movable Type's future lies in Japan. Today it was announced that Six Apart KK (SAKK), a subsidiary of SAY Media, has been acquired by a Japanese IT company called Infocom. As of February 1, 2011 SAKK will assume responsibility for the worldwide Movable Type business, as well as the Six Apart brand. 

Once upon a time, Six Apart (news, site) played in the big leagues. The blog software provider raised over US $22 million, landed the cover of an issue of Fortune, bought and sold companies for profit, etc. But the tides have done what they do best, turning the company's tune somber with reports of serious financial trouble. 

Following the recent acquisition of Six Apart many speculated -- often pessimistically -- about the future of the once ground-breaking Movable Type (MT) software. We sat down with the current MT product manager for a chat about the details. Here's what we learned.

Say hello to SAY Media, Inc. The new company is a combination of media advertising player VideoEgg and Moveable Type's maker, Six Apart. The acquisition and new company formation have just been announced. Company reps assert that the combined media network now reaches more than 345 million unique visitors. Not much was said about the Movable Type web publishing software which launched Six Apart nine years ago this month. Speculation abounds.

There's no easy way to say it: Vox, Six Apart's (news, site) blogging/social network platform, is dead.

In yet another move that screams of the merger Six Apart continues to deny, Vox will be officially kaput on September 30th.

Six Apart (news, site), the blogging pioneer that hasn't garnered much attention in over a year, started making headlines again last week. Though executives are reportedly denying any goings-on, rumor has it that the company is looking to make a deal in the Japanese market. 

Ladies and gentleman, Anil Dash has officially left the building.

As the very first employee at blogging and social media software maker, Six Apart (news, site) and a seasoned blogger himself (10 years!), Dash has been intrinsic to the company as well as the online writing discussion since the beginning. Consequently, his departure throws up a little red flag for some of us -- what does this mean for blogging? Or for Six Apart? Well we asked him, and this is what he had to say:

Earlier this week, Salesforce.com (news, site) announced the closing of private placement funding in the amount of US$ 575 million. It comes in the form of convertible senior notes due 2015.

Salesforce.com says these notes are unsecured, unsubordinated obligations, with interest being paid semi-annually at a rate of 0.75% per year.

According to the company, they expect to use some of the funds for general purposes which could include an acquisition or two, maybe a joint venture or something similar.

Tom Foremski, of ZDNet, sees social media as a prime acquisition market for Salesforce.com. He mentioned SocialText, Six Apart and BrightIdea as potential acquisition targets. All are already in the enterprise arena, so it may not take as much work to get them integrated and into the hands of Salesforce.com customers.

And social media does make sense. Many enterprise content management vendors are integrating social media capabilities into their solutions, many social computing vendors are talking more and more about the integration of business and social networking and social media capabilities.

With Salesforce.com offering a host of cloud based business services, integrating the much in demand social media capabilities seem almost a requirement to stay competitive. And they have already started with their own Salesforce Chatter service offering, but they could go much further.

But what will they actually do with the money? We'll be watching to see what they do next.

We’re about a week into the New Year, but don’t cork up those bottles just yet. At long last, Six Apart (news, site) has released Movable Type 5. The new version is being called “a great milestone in the 8 years of Movable Type history” by its team, and MT users are more than happy to welcome some long-awaited features -- features which we say take this project one step closer being a full-fledged Web CMS.  
 

Welcome to the November 2009 installment of our what's coming from the open source CMS projects in the next 30 days.

If you're looking through here and feel that your project was left out, we invite you to send us an email at pr@cmswire.com with a pointer to who we should contact for your project updates.

Six Apart (news, site) is all over the place lately. In addition to Movable Type integrating Zemanta, the company has two new introductions to make. 

TypePad Cloud Platform is a new tool that enables developers to build social applications via the system's API. Meanwhile storage, infrastructure and organization of the data is left to TypePad's cloud environment.  Secondly, meet TypePad Motion, the first application built on the new platform. Typepad Motion is a microblogging app that evolved from Pownce, which Six Apart acquired last year. 

As many of us wait patiently for the third beta of Movable Type (news, site) version 5, the team behind the popular Web CMS continues to tide us over with other updates.

Most recently they announced their partnership with Zemanta, a service that boosts content (blog posts, articles or web pages) by scouring the Web for related images, smart links, keywords and text,. The idea is that serving up these results to the user will enable them to enrich and inform their content in the most relevant ways. And by 'relevant; we mean Zemanta has indexed over one million popular media sources such as Wikimedia Commons and Flickr. 

"Using Zemanta is sort of like having a content servant at your elbow suggesting ways to make what you're writing more interesting and compelling through photos, videos, related articles, and useful tags," wrote Ginger Tully, Director of Marketing, Six Apart. 

Zemanta now comes built-in to Movable Type version 4.32, so if you haven't updated yet, now is a really good time to do so. Check out Zemanta's article about exactly how they're working with Movable Type here, then grab the newest version of the CMS and go content crazy. 

Six Apart (news, site) has kept their word and released a patch for the aforementioned bug in Movable Type 4.3. The new release, version 4.31, fixes some funk associated with custom fields and entry assets. More specifically, there was the possibility of a user viewing a template that might show code not designed to be viewed by the end user and couldn't be executed. New barriers include:

• Only allow the template_id parameter when the archive_type parameter exists.
• Force the template being used to match the archive type (e.g. if you're trying to paginate category archives, the template you're using has to be one that is producing category archives).
• Not allow the use of the template_id parameter when the extension is php or asp.
• Created a config directive (SearchAlwaysAllowTemplateID) that would always allow the use of template_id.  

Some other bits around the comment pagination javascript were fixed as well, and details can be found in the release notes here. Or you can just go straight for the download.

As the Movable Type team says, this release was almost entirely based on user requests and bug reports, so keep the ball rolling after you've upgraded to 4.31 by dropping your two cents here. 

We’re back with what's probably our zillionth bit about microblogging, but this time it’s not about Twitter. Ok, it's a little bit about Twitter, but that's it.

Six Apart (news, site), eager as anyone else to be a part of the phenomenon, has added a microblogging function to TypePad. The new tool streamlines your updates with its “post from anywhere” capabilities, and works in conjunction with e-mail, the iPhone and the new TypePad Blog It bookmarklet.

It’s here, it’s here, it’s here. After a flirty beta dance, Movable Type 4.3 is finally taking the stage.

We already threw together and pushed out a couple posts about the bread crumbs Six Apart dropped before the release, and since this is sort of like a lightweight Christmas for you MT fans we'll get straight down to business and tell you about the biggest new features in 4.3: