Movable Type Finally becomes Open-Source
“As of today, and forever forward, Movable Type is open source”. With this statement the Movable Type team announced their spinning over to open source.
This is good new to the millions of bloggers out there, another major open source platform for blogging. I tried it out some time ago but gave it up for WordPress for several reasons including no anti_spam plugin like Akismet and it was not particularly easy to configure. Now being Open source, many developers could lay their hands on their codes and start building up themes and plugins like the many we have with WordPress.
“Our goal has always been to create the best blogging platform in the world and to put that power in the hands of as many people as possible. And we want to honor a tradition of openness that Movable Type has embodied for over six years” – So what does Movable Type Open Source (MTOS) come with;
– MTOS has every feature in Movable Type 4.0 along with several new minor improvements and bug fixes.
– All plugins, themes, templates, designs, and APIs that work with MT4 work with MTOS. MTOS also works with other Six Apart open source technologies such as memcached.
– MTOS is one of the only open source blogging tools with built-in support for an unlimited number of blogs, an unlimited number of authors, and sign-in with OpenID, with no plugins needed.
– We’ll be adding additional paclass benefits for people who’ve paclass for commercial licenses for Movable Type, with benefits like improved technical support and custom add-ons such as plugins or themes.
and more…
Last but not the least; Movable Type Open Source is being released under the standard GPL license.
9:42 pm on December 12th, 2007
Hi, I’m about to move out of blogger, maybe I should try movable type , what do you think?
10:35 pm on December 12th, 2007
Has anyone out there tried it, or knows a blog that uses MT?
11:06 am on December 13th, 2007
I use Movable Type for my blog on outshine.com. But I’m not holding it up as a great example. I never finished modding the templates. So if you do something like preview a comment, it looks uuuuuglly. That’s because I killed the original templates but failed to replace every template. I got about 90% done.
The nice things about Movable Type? Great handling of multiple sites or blogs. Each site that it powers can have a completely different interface, or they can be the same. Authors can have access to post on some, all, or one. The terminology used for everything is very simple and easy to understand. So you’ll “get” the interface fairly quickly. Also, it provides two ways to power your site. You can use the Perl scripts to generate .html files, or you can use the PHP scripts to have a “live” site. The Perl scripts require you to “rebuild” the site each time you publish something, as it has to add new .html files onto the server. But if you get ambushed by lots of traffic (perhaps you get Dugg or Slashdotted) it’s a Godsend. The plain .html files serve up super-fast, with no dynamic code or database connectivity needed. The PHP scripts make it work like WordPress, essentially. It pulls data out of the database live, as people view pages. This means that you can do all sorts of nice database-driven stuff like user management systems, but it also means that it’s not as robust under load.
I don’t know how MT PHP scripts stack up against WP PHP scripts. Which kind of site would buckle under load first? Not sure. I know the Perl -> .html files is a very robust system.
I’ve just downloaded the MT 4 files. I’m installing it on a server I have for testing. It seems a lot like 3.2 so far, but I just got into it. Hopefully now that it’s Open Source, development will increase, and good extensions/plugins will proliferate.
8:13 pm on December 15th, 2007
The Lifehacker blog uses Movable Type