Movable Type 4, Is MT Ready For A Comeback?
As Movable Type is preparing the Gold release of the new MT4 version, one can only wonder if the once dominating blog platform the power has to make a comeback en force, based on the power of an open-source GPL license and thanks to the community. The Movable Type community is working hard at another package, based upon MT4 and licensed under the GPL. Movable Type Open Source (MTOS) will be released later this year in Q3.
Right now not much can be said about the features of MTOS, but the upcoming release of MT4 might give us an idea of what we can expect.
Are the new features in MT4 exciting enough to catch attention?
Redesigned Dashboard
The new dashboard is very modernly styled and almost completely customizable, thanks to the MT template tags. It seems as if this feature will rather be used by the real coding, designing geek than Joe Average, but expect many dashboard mods to be released by the MT community.
The nicest features for the user who doesn’t like to customize the dashboard structure, are IMO the standard activity log and graphics for entries and comments, but I can’t really say those are groundbreaking reasons to switch to MT.
Simplified Installation
The installation process of Movable Type has become a lot easier, but still isn’t easy enough, compared to other platforms such as WordPress or even Expression Engine.
And honestly, a 40 minutes long upload process (almost 2000 files) might put off users. To have a chance long term, the MT community definitely has to create a Fantastico installation process, because I can’t imagine updating several blogs if I didn’t have shell access to uncompress archives directly on the server.
Better Publishing
Except for the world’s smartest template language I really can’t figure out what is innovative among the new features in MT4. Unless it were for the in house support for both Markdown and Textile, which are standard plugins MT4 is shipped with.
A notable mention deserves the easy multiblog setup, but the biggest annoyance about MT has not been solved yet: the slow republishing system when the user opts for statically published template pages. Rebuilding archives still takes ages depending on their size. The standard implementation of the CatCalendar plugin would have improved MT4 majorly.
Update: Byrne Reese, Product Manager of MT, points out in the comments that the CatCalendar functionality has been intgerated in the core of MT4.
Community Building Services
Community building improvements, such as built-in registration, the integration of OpenID (and other services), rating services and customizable feeds or even reply to comments from the dashboard, don’t really do it to me. I fail to see any innovative factor in those new features — innovative to the blogosphere that is — as most of those features are nothing more than the core implementation of some of the most popular plugins for other systems.
Conclusion
This might be a groundbreaking release for the MT community, but from the view of a WordPress user there is nothing to get really excited about MT4. The success of MT4 will majorly depend on the speed and accuracy of the MT community to release new plugins, already existing popular plugins for other platforms.
MT might have a more stable, better scaling platform for the industrial blogger but right at the moment MT4 (and MTOS) isn’t ready to start eating of WordPress’s cake. MT4 needs to be simplified, simplified for the user, not every blogger is a code freak, wanting to fiddle with templates.
An active and thriving community certainly can make MT more popular and a widespread alternative to WordPress.
The Six Apart Team deserves all merits for having released MT under an open source GPL license!
Disclosure: I recently switched several of my own sites from WP to MT4 RC and the geek in me loves that almost every plugin I was looking for (sitemap, contact form, feed redirect to Feedburner), can be realized with MT templates, but all this could have been solved much easier. Right now I can’t advise anyone without coder’s, designer’s soul to switch from WP to MT.
Speaking as a member of the Movable Type community, I can tell you that MT 4 doesn’t do it for me either. Six Apart claim to have rebuilt MT from scratch. That might be true but it’s also obvious that it offers relatively few genuinely new features - most existed before in the form of third party plugins. And the new dashboard is awful - it takes considerably longer to do stuff with MT 4 than with MT3+.
MT4 is a real disappointment. Six Apart should reconsider releasing it in its current form - just as their user community has been asking them to do.
By LSF on August 10, 2007 5:16 pm
One quick correction:
As a matter of fact, the Cat Calendar plugin has been folded into the core of Movable Type. Now any archive can be paginated by any time period the publisher desires. That includes category archives, but also author archives as well. Tests have shown internally that Movable Type’s publishing speeds have been increased up to 20% using its new templates.
Byrne Reese
Product Manager, Movable Type
By Byrne Reese on August 10, 2007 7:11 pm
Thanks for that correction, Byrne. I have updated the post accordingly.
Is there an easy way to find those settings or have I overseen them? Or is it a template tag?
By Franky on August 10, 2007 7:25 pm
@LSF: Anil Dash said it best in a recent email exchange on ProNet in response to a user expressing a similar opinion regard MT’s feature set:
The fact though is this: Movable Type 4.0 has over 50 legitimately new features to users available right out of the box. Plus it has over 100 new template tags for designing blog, and 50 additional API features made available to developers through its API.
But “MT4″ is about so much more than “Movable Type 4.0,” which is just the first step of many. MT4 is in fact about an entire line of products and an entire series of releases that we will be making over the next 6-12 months, through which I sincerely hope to achieve the following goals:
to demonstrate to users that Six Apart is committed to this product
that we have the ability to listen to and take action on the community’s feedback
that Movable Type is a serious blogging platform for serious bloggers
I for one view Movable Type 4.0 as a beginning, not an end. And I think in time others will see that as well. From a new product, to a new web site, to a new community home, to a new plugin directory, to completely rewritten documentation, to better to support, to additional services like the Six Apart Update stream and more, to more features, more themes and a larger more vibrant community.
I for one am excited. Excited and proud of what we have done, and even more excited for what’s next.
Byrne Reese
Product Manager, Movable Type
By Byrne Reese on August 10, 2007 11:44 pm
@Franky - Regarding paginated archives. Here are few documents that might help you:
* Upgrading MT3 templates
* About Archive Mapping
By Byrne Reese on August 10, 2007 11:47 pm
I’ve been testing MT4 since the first beta release. While there are still a few things that don’t work as advertised the number of bugs is reduced with every release.
Overall I’m very happy with MT4 and I intend to migrate all my non MT blogs over to the platform once a couple of the minor issues have been resolved
Michele
By Michele on August 13, 2007 12:38 pm
Michelle, I’m sure once I’ve dug through all the MT template tags, I’ll appreciate MT4 more than I do now.
By Franky on August 13, 2007 1:14 pm