Six Apart is announcing today the beta release of Movable Type 4, a much anticipated upgrade to a blog platform that has two distinct user bases nowadays - consumer base (like R/WW, which uses MT) and Enterprise. Of equal interest is that Six Apart is also announcing the Movable Type Open Source Project, a move that will see the release of an open source version of Movable Type in Q3 of this year.
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.
MT4 also promises more down-to-earth functionality, like improvements in fighting blog spam. There will be a number of technical improvements, such as database caching through Memcached and authenticating of users with OpenID. MT4 also brings a new component-based architecture, which unifies its commercial and enterprise product lines "while enabling advanced capabilities with optional functionality packs". All in all, there is a lot of new and improved functionality in MT4 (more on how this will effect bloggers like me, below).
To understand why Six Apart is releasing an open source version of Movable Type, we need to briefly revisit its past. Movable Type was once the darling of the blogosphere, especially from its original launch in 2001 to about 2004 (when licensing issues upset many bloggers). Since 2004/05, many bloggers have migrated to the open source Wordpress - and perhaps of more concern, a lot of third party developers transferred their efforts from MT to Wordpress. However to make up for the loss of momentum in the consumer market, Movable Type began to sow some seeds in the Enterprise market. Back in October 2006 Read/WriteWeb reported on the release of Movable Type Enterprise 1.5. Movable Type at that point was being positioned as an advanced tool, suitable for enterprises and power bloggers alike. What's changed since then is that it now wants to be a social media platform, and the open sourcing will address some market concerns over licensing.
Read/WriteWeb is powered by Movable Type. It's held up well over the years, particularly as the site has scaled a lot over the past 1-2 years. I do however have some minor issues with MT (and note we are using MT 3.2 currently, so we're not using the most recent version). The first is that I have looked on rather enviously at some of the plug-ins available to Wordpress users. For example, outputting tags for posts, integrating comments and trackbacks, and listing "related entries" - these things are a lot harder with MT than it is with Wordpress. In chatting with Anil Dash from Six Apart tonight, he assured me that almost all of the top 10 or 15 MT plugins have been integrated into MT4. This would certainly make things easier for me, as I am not a fan of fiddling around with Perl (when I could be writing blog posts with that time).
Another of my current peeves is that comments are far too slow on R/WW currently. I haven't been able to pinpoint the exact cause of this, but I am almost certain it's an MT issue (as my research has indicated other MT blogs have suffered similar problems with slow comments). Anil told me that there are a lot of scaling pieces that are new in 4.0, that come from Vox and LiveJournal and Typepad - and from that they've learned to handle commenting from tens of milions of users. It sounds like relief may be on the way for R/WW's commenters then!
It remains to be seen how the open source effort will be received by the blogging public, but certainly MT4 sounds like a big functionality and performance improvement over MT3. For purely selfish reasons I hope it can fix all the minor technical issues R/WW has had with scaling, but also of course it will be a huge boost for Six Apart if MT4 has indeed ramped up technically and can meet the needs of small businesses (like mine) and enterprises alike. The social media platform is exciting too, and I can certainly see ways R/WW can leverage that!
Here are some early screenshots. Let us know in the comments what you think of MT4.
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If comments have slowed recently it's worth checking any Ping services you use. One of the default services pinged by MT is now offline, and this causes the comment posting system to wait for the ping to timeout before proceeding.
I forget offhand which one is no longer operational.....
Rob
Posted by: Rob Sharp | June 5, 2007 2:08 AMDoesn't the slow comment problem have something to do with rebuilding? At first glance, it seems the number of pages rebuilt after a comment is posted would remain constant as a site grows, but it's my understanding that's not always true.
I've always like MT because it generates static pages. The downside of that is, first, the need to rebuild pages every time their content changes, and, second, it makes it tough or expensive to pull off some of the tricks performed by WP plugins.
The upside, and I think it's a big upside, is that your site is a lot less likely to generate a query storm and overwhelm its database once the popularity gods point their finger at it. It's hard to beat the efficiency of simply serving flat HTML. A lot of people hosting WP and other My SQL-based blogs on shared hosts are attracted by promises of huge storage limits, many domains, etc., forgetting that their host will, out of necessity, limit their database and CPU use.
The last time I used MT I used it on lightpd with FastCGI enabled. It seemed to grab memory at a fairly consistent rate and never give it back. To keep within bounds, I had to use a cheap-and-dirty script to restart lighttpd every so often. If it's learned to behave, I'd take another look.
Posted by: billg | June 5, 2007 5:06 AMYes, I have to agree commenting takes waaaay too long than on other blogs.
It will be interesting to try the open source version of MT as opposed to WP.
Posted by: Ali | June 5, 2007 6:29 AMI hadn't thought about RWW using MT, but perhaps that's why commenting here on mobile devices NEVER works for me. :(
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick | June 5, 2007 7:01 AMAs a long suffering Moveable Type user who has already started to migrate over to WordPress for new blogs, I hope this release makes up for the last 3-4 years of shameful neglect this platform has suffered. I was just planning to start the conversion away from MT for our main blog, but will hold out for a few weeks to see how reviews and examples of the 4.0 beta look. Like others I had an early affinity for these guys, but they've managed to create only distain with pointless update after pointless update. Last chance guys.
Posted by: Craig Danuloff | June 5, 2007 8:28 AMI agree that MT has been needing an update and from the screenshots, MT4 looks like a home run. My most requested feature? Better spam blockers. I'm confident this will be a great release and look forward to installing the upgrade.
Posted by: David Ciccarelli | June 5, 2007 8:47 AM"Of equal interest is that Six Apart is also announcing the [Movable Type Open Source Project], a move t"
the link between brackets on the post itself isn't correct.
Posted by: user | June 5, 2007 8:56 AM#7, you are right. The actual link wasn't available at time of posting, but I have now updated the post with it.
As for the comments issue on r/ww, I am certainly looking for a solution! :-) Any suggestions appreciated and I will look into the suggestions made already. Thanks for bearing with us on this issue, it is my #1 priority to get the comments speeded up.
Posted by: Richard MacManus | June 5, 2007 11:00 AMGood to see Six Apart investing some time in MT...They have way too many platforms...
For improving the comment performance, One of the thing to do is to use background tasks
(http://www.sixapart.com/pronet/articles/how_to_speed_up.html) which might give the impression of fast response although the comment will not show up right away (it will take the rebuild to complete)...
Posted by: Jitendra | June 5, 2007 11:11 AMThe link http://www.movabletype.org/opensource/ is not working at the moment.
I would like to ask why you chose MT for R/WW. Which others did you evaluate, and what made MT the winner?
How about Pligg for an Open Source Social Media CMS? Its popularity should be something to consider.
Posted by: MeTheGeek | June 5, 2007 1:31 PMDoes anyone have a live demo I could test? I can't manage to install it on my own (what a surprise!).
My host usually does the upgrades and I don't want to tell them to do it until I check it out first.
Posted by: Bert | June 5, 2007 2:05 PM@Richard MacManus, chances are you're already doing all of this, but asides from Background Jobs and the Rebuild Queue Plugin, are you running the comment script on mod_perl or FastCGI?
Posted by: Nei | June 5, 2007 4:17 PMThe beta is very rough at this stage. A lot of new looks but not everything works. No real noticeable performance improvements because you can't run it at anything like a production pace. I could not manage a successful install, and others had problems too.
Depending on your hosting situation, you may an may not be able to play with this beta. I was able to check out some functionality at a demo install:
http://www.movabletype4.org
It looks very promising. The UI for posting has taken a giant leap forward. The clone blog feature looks great.
Posted by: Bud Gibson | June 5, 2007 7:35 PMOn the slow comments issue, I assume you have seen this?
http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/news/2007/05/important_updat.html
Be sure to make the setting changes for the plugin on your individual blog page, as well as on your system page, if it shows up in both places.
Worked like a charm for me.
Posted by: Jack Bog | June 6, 2007 12:11 AMI'm running MT also and experience the same comments issue. Moving the comments section to it's own file and then including that file where necessary helped some.
I'm so excited for the MT release. There are a few things I prefer MT for over Wordpress, but I too have almost salivated at the multitude of Wordpress plugins over MT. I am hoping the ratings section is better since I run a food reviews blog - this is something I have long been waiting for improved user interaction.
Posted by: tanya | June 6, 2007 11:56 AMWhen I chose to use Wordpress as my blogging platform and initially saw just how rough looking the admin panel was, I started having second thoughts, but that quickly dissipated once I began to install plugins and saw just how WP's plugin platform alone made it leaps and bounds better than MT. Page loads are fast, comments are submitted quickly without issue, something I only began to appreciate recently when I started commenting on MT blogs and noticed how ridiculously and agonizingly slow it was just to post one, especially if the blogger was using Typekey. Ick.
It was mentioned previously that "query storms" were a downside to WP, but that problem's been licked by the use of WP-Cache, a plugin which converts my pages to static pages for a preset period of time. Just to add a nice bonus, I'm also using Digg Defender which is, yep yet another plugin that redirects monster traffic coming from places like Digg to a cached version of the site via Coral Cache.
WP has one MAJOR downside though: the ability to upgrade successfully without requiring the effort of rocket scientists who all took part in the Manhattan project. It's not uncommon to see your plugins and themes work nice and smoothly only to see half of them break and in extreme cases nuke your blog with a simple upgrade.
Which is why I may see myself moving to MT4 in the future if and when their platform is finally able to match the versatility and power of Wordpress (from the use of tags to widgets and whatnot). It will be interesting to see what happens. :-)
Posted by: Lincoln | June 6, 2007 12:56 PMLincoln, MT creates static pages by default, so there's no need for an add-on cache to do that. About a month ago, I tried to set up WP-Cache using the latest version of both it and WP. Couldn't get it to work and queries at its site went unanswered.
Expression Engine (the commercial version, not the freebie, I believe) has a built-in caching system. Don't know about other blog tools.
I've used WP a fair bit and have never had any real upgrading problems. However, any software with so many third-party add-ons and freely available source is going to be prone to upgrade issues. WP's intermingling of PHP and page layout doesn't do much to help, either.
I doubt MT can compete with WP in terms of plugins and widgets, but it's got a good number of them. As for tags, MT may well have more than WP (haven't counted, though). Keep in mind that MT pushes text through templates and deposits the resulting file on the server when you create a post. WP waits until someone requests a page, then grabs data and runs it through a template. That has real implications for how you do, or don't do, things, in both platforms.
It's important to keep one blogging platform from overwhelming the market. Here's hoping MT4 attracts more users.
Posted by: billg | June 6, 2007 5:10 PMRegarding caching, my point was that it could be done in WP, whether natively or through an add-on. But you also raise a good point that it doesn't always work. I read of one blogger who activated it and it corrupted his files during peak traffic. Wasn't very pleased about it. In my case it works perfectly so I'm lucky. If it didn't I would have seriously considered going to MT. Though MT offers tagging too, my understanding was that it wasn't as sophisticated as the tagging plugins you can find for WP, (in my case my tags system also outputs a list of related entries not only in my posts but also in my feeds as well).
I'm also concerned about WP's development process which seems to be in too much of a damned hurry to me. A lot of plugin developers have barely issued updates for 2.1 and already 2.2 comes charging out of the gates, with 2.3 scheduled to be released shortly afterwards. All this hustle and bustle and the interface still looks like crap? They're moving too fast and I think eventually it's going to bite them on the...... :-)
Posted by: Lincoln | June 7, 2007 3:13 PMJack #14, thanks for pointing out that fix. I've done that now, so let's see if it works...
Posted by: Richard MacManus | June 10, 2007 1:02 AMSadly this new version of Movable Type is inaccessible, unlike most previous versions. Perhaps your heading should have been 'What MT4 will bring to current Movable Type users with sight'.
Posted by: LSF | June 10, 2007 7:38 PMIn following quote from above, what specifically does "rights to post alongside authors" mean? I assume it's different than posting comment? How is this different? Thanks.
"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."
Posted by: Doug Fox | June 26, 2007 8:21 AMDid you know that you could check out Movable Type v4.0 known also as Movable Type Athena project without any effort?
Go and discover the full featured online demo
http://www.movabletype4.org/
Posted by: Mihai Bocsaru | June 28, 2007 7:53 AMHave checked out Movable Type 4 and it's terrible. All Six Apart seem to have done is to absorb some popular third party plugins and make some cosmetic changes that actually make it less easy to use. MT 4 is likely to be a disaster for Six Apart.
Posted by: Lee | August 10, 2007 5:30 PMqweqweqwe
Posted by: 1 | August 14, 2007 6:11 AM