Movable Type 4.0
Posted on June 5, 2007
Filed Under Blogs |
"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 and later in the beta period more community features are promised." – Read/WriteWeb
I implemented MT for SAP’s internal blogging network, am running Wordpress for this blog, my last company’s site/blog was Drupal, and Enterprise Irregulars is on Blogtronix. You really can’t appreciate the any given platform by reading someone’s account of them, or the company’s promotional material; each of these platforms has strengths and weaknesses which map to what you need and how you deploy them.
At the time I did SAP’s blogging network the multi-user version of Wordpress was not yet available, and being able to manage multiple blogs and multiple authors through a single console was an absolute requirement. I wanted something clean and unobtrusive, and Jeff at Plan Resonate worked with us to deliver a very cool internal blogging service. The one challenge we had was getting the more advanced plugins to work reliably.
Movable Type worked well, and reliably which isn’t surprising, but developing for it was not easy, the number of plugins was limited, and I disliked having to rebuild the blog after even the smallest config changes (I do understand that there is a way around this today).
Wordpress, on the other hand, is really clean and fast, has a huge community of developers around it and organizationally they remain focused. I don’t mean to imply that Six Apart isn’t focused, but the fact remains that between Typepad, Vox, LiveJournal, their media business, and MT… well they have a lot going on. It’s my anecdotal observation that MT has been getting a little long in the tooth (where the hell does that saying come from?) and this 4.0 major upgrade is much needed.
From what I’ve seen in the screenshots, they have certainly devoted some cycles to delivering a clean and compelling admin console, if that’s indicative of the other features they are delivering I am sure that this will be a strong upgrade.
I’ll reserve comment on the open source announcement they also made because quite frankly that is now the ante for the blogging platform game. From a strategic standpoint, I don’t think you can get platform momentum with a closed source product in this sector.
Tags: Movable Type, Six Apart, Wordpress, Blogtronix, Drupal, blogs
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My name is Jeff Nolan and I write Venture Chronicles. These are my thoughts on technology, innovation, management, public policy and pretty much anything else that I find interesting.
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