Six Apart News & Articles

Boing Boing, one of the more influential blogs out there, has just launched on Movable Type 4.

And boy does it look cool. The site is not only faster and easier on the eyes; it also boasts a new design by Studio Sans Nom and a rekindled comments feature.

There’s also a new personal technology blog which you probably want to check out if you want to be all opinionated about the latest and greatest in front of all your friends — even if you cannot have said latest and greatest.

Way to hit the ground running. Cheers to Boing Boing and Six Apart (Movable Type’s parent company)!

Of all the things to love about the release of the newest version of Movable Type, the built-in search engine rarely makes the list. Fortunately for the MT user, the popular and aptly named PHP plugin for Movable Type - Fast Search - has just been updated to support MT 4.

After much pomp, circumstance and plenty of clean-up, Six Apart today releases the commercial version of Movable Type 4.

Characterized as “the largest release in the product’s history” by EVP and General Manager Chris Alden of Six Apart’s professional division, MT4 is the result of collaboration and input from enterprise customers, pro bloggers and the ever opinionated developer community. The latter group has been taking healthy bites out of beta for some time.

Most notably, the v4 release marks Movable Type’s departure from the “blogging” pigeonhole. The product is now on its way to becoming a fully fledged Web content management system and community platform.

With the fourth release candidate of Movable Type 4.0 available as of today, Six Apart evangelist Anil Dash unleashes a wild-eyed call to devs, designers, strategists, consultants and systems integrators.

This week a series of online events will assist techies, content builders and web aesthetes alike in best leveraging MT4, as well as helping make upgrades and transitions as smooth as possible.

No one can ever say Six Apart’s Movable Type 4 suffers from lack of ambition.

Noting most bloggers can probably talk their heads off, given the chance, Movable Type releases fully-integrated out-of-box podcasting support. No plugin necessary.

Say hello to Beta 7, a logistical first for a major blog purveyor.

Today marks the beta release for Movable Type 4. Excited? No joke.

This news merits uncharacteristic pomp and circumstance because Movable Type is the blog platform of choice for a number of enterprises, and because v4.0 also marks said platform’s departure from the exclusive world of blogging.

So if you thought you knew every trick a blog could possibly pull, prepare to be dazzled, or at least sufficiently interested to download the free beta. Movable Type has decidedly 180’d on us.

Perhaps because everybody’s jumping into the Web 2.0 CMS game, longtime arena contender Six Apart separates itself from (or some say joins) the throng with the Movable Type Community Pack (CP). The Pack takes mere blogs and turns them into community participation supernovas.

Six Apart, the parent company for popular enterprise and casual blogging services like LiveJournal, Vox, TypePad, and Movable Type, recently accepted a Shiny Media award for Best Web 2.0 innovation.

Jan 16 saw the release of Movable Type 3.34, a semi-distant point release which promises to fix some concerning XSS vulnerabilities and more notably delivers accessible scalability derived from the leveraging of FastCGI.

FastCGI, while meaningless to most of you and perhaps a little reminiscent of the late 90’s for the other 2%, handily increases Movable Type (MT) performance by something on the order of 15x. Woot MT geeks! And more to that, the new version is a free update for all legit MT users.

Announced without a lot of fanfare yesterday was Six Apart’s latest version of their enterprise blogging platform.

Movable Type Enterprise (MTE), a souped-up version of 6A’s commercial blogging platform, has just turned one-point-five. Still, some say MTE is just glossy packaging, the “E” word, and an inflated price tag. Perhaps, perhaps not. By and by the “E” (for Enterprise) is being earned and despite the nay sayers, there is a place for Enterprise Blogging software.

Today the maker of the ever famous blogging software MovableType has annouced a Business Blogging initiative with solutions for a number of organization types and industries. The foundation: either their Movable Type or their hosted TypePad software.

Learn more.

If I’ve got my sums right, Movable Type 1.0 was release 4 years ago tomorrow. Hey we don’t scribble on Saturdays (most of the time), so this is going out today.

Here’s a big thank you to Ben and Mina, Anil, and to the ever essential community that have made MT much more than just a technology. Its been a fantastic ride. Its been inspirational work all around. We’re very pleased to play a small part. We’re excited about the future you’ve helped create.

Happy Birthday MT.

Perl is great, but then only when someone else is programming it. During today's investigation with the new MT 3.1 code tree and with great pleasure, I delved into the "mt/php" directory.

Dynamic Pages are a feature of MT 3.1. They are implemented with PHP. What I did not realize previously is that the good blogging folk at Six Apart had done what appears to be a nearly complete port of MT from Perl (bless it) to PHP. This port appears to include support for all current MT tags, it relies on Justin Vincent's ezSQL DB library and Smarty templates, and even supports a plug-in API.

An enterprising young Neil Turner of York, United Kingdom has posted a review of the recently released Movable Type 3.0 Developers Edition.

Neil steers far clear of the recent outcry (whining) about MT's new licensing model (What? Pay for software?). He also doesn't dig too far under the covers with regards to technical changes for MT 3.0.

What he does do is give a very nice overview of the new publishing interface and features. He also takes a little scare out of the prospect of upgrading.

Read the review.

The question that was posed to me recently was: "Can I use Movable Type as a Web CMS solution?" My answer: "Yes, but...".

Movable Type is the prolific blogging tool produced by Ben and Mena Trott, the dynamic duo running Silicon Valley's SixApart. Its also the technology behind this and 1000's of other websites.