Movable Type

Introducing Movable Type 5

2010-01-05T12:57:10Z

We’re pleased to announce the availability of Movable Type 5 in the US and Europe today.

Movable Type 5 takes a new approach to social publishing by starting with a website and adding blogs. This is in response to an increasing number of customers who've added their Movable Type blogs to existing websites, or who've used the Page feature to assemble a full website with blogs to quickly and easily update their content.

Movable Type 5 is designed to make it easier than ever to build an integrated social presence on the web, complete with an all-in-one social website.

The goal of Movable Type 5 is to give businesses, organizations and individuals a single, unified software package with integrated website and blog capabilities. It's been enhanced for the easy creation, administration and management of websites and blogs - all from a single user dashboard.

Here are some of the new and improved features in MT5:

A new user dashboard for both the website and blogs. This makes it easy for authors, editors, designers and other publishers to easily navigate between the two.

A new theme mechanism that makes it easy to apply a new theme across a website and blogs with a single click that proliferates changes throughout the published site.

Enhanced content management features that include revision history and new custom fields. There are five new object types for custom fields: website, blog, comment, template and asset.

If you haven't had a look at Movable Type 5 yet, please give it a try and let us know what you think. If you have questions, you might want to check the Pricing and Licensing FAQ or the newly refreshed and enhanced user documentation.

A note to our Movable Type customers who use plugins: Because of UI changes in Movable Type 5, some existing Movable Type plugins may not yet be compatible with Movable Type 5. Documentation on how you can update your plugins for MT5 is coming soon to movabletype.org. In the meantime, we hope you’ll have a look at MT5 and let us know what you think.

A note to our Enterprise customers: We will put Movable Type 5 under extensive scalability and performance testing before we release it in the Enterprise version. This will take several months, so we anticipate its availability later in 2010. Please contact your Six Apart Services representative if you’d like more information.

Happy Holidays from Movable Type

2009-12-23T00:46:11Z

We wish our customers and community a happy holiday and a fabulous new year.

Announcing the TypePad Platform

2009-10-01T17:23:54Z

This morning we announced the public release of the TypePad Platform and APIs, which we hope will inspire a new generation of community tools such as TypePad Motion, a new open source microblogging application available today. You can try TypePad Motion out for yourself or go get the code and API access right now.

Since TypePad launched six years ago, Movable Type and TypePad have been sibling platforms that have developed in parallel. As of today, the opening of the TypePad Platform means that Movable Type users and developers will be able to more easily take advantage of the new features and infrastructure improvements we're making to Typepad all the time.

We're excited to see the kinds of apps the community will develop using the TypePad APIs, and we look forward to getting your feedback. Six Apart CEO Chris Alden posted about the significance of the TyepPad Platform on the Six Apart blog today. Please have a look at his post for for a sense of his vision for Six Apart and for more detail about the Platform, the Developer Program, and TypePad Motion.

Movable Type 4.32 Now Available - with Zemanta Built In

2009-09-29T20:50:57Z

Today we're announcing a partnership with Zemanta whereby the Zemanta editorial assistance tool will recommend content to you as you write your blog posts. The tool is built in to version 4.32 of MovableType, so if you are a prolific blogger who produces a lot of content on a regular basis, you'll find this feature very helpful.

Many of you have likely heard of Zemanta, and perhaps some of you already use it as a plug in to your Firefox browser or other online tools. Using Zemanta is sort of like having a content servant at your elbow suggesting ways to make what you're writing more interesting and compelling through photos, videos, related articles, and useful tags.

Need a photo to match a post you're writing? Zemanta to the rescue. Like to be reminded to tag your post so that it's search engine optimized? Zemanta will help you out. Zemanta has indexed more than a million top media sources and quality blogs, including Wikimedia Commons, Flickr and various stock photo providers to make it easier for you to create compelling posts.

You can see what else Zemanta can do for you if you go to this FAQ page on their site.

We hope you'll download 4.32 and give it a try. And then tell us what you think.

Social Media Seminar at Harvard with MC Hammer - don't miss it

2009-08-19T18:36:15Z

If you're going to be in the Boston area at the end of this month, plan to stop by the Harvard Faculty Club in Cambridge to attend the Gravity Summit Social Media Marketing for Business Conference, which will be held on August 31. Six Apart is a Media Sponsor, so we are offering a discount to the conference to members of our community. There are just a few seats left, so sign up soon.

Hip Hop entertainer and Twitter personality MC Hammer is the keynote speaker. See more details on our main Six Apart blog.

What, exactly, do men want?

2009-08-17T16:40:40Z

Well, judging by the success of Uncrate, "The Buyers Guide for Men", Larry Angell and his crew have nailed the answer to this age-old question. With a readership of over 600,000 visitors per month, 72% of whom are male, Uncrate serves up a living catalog every day of extremely cool things that men, well, want. The very social website, built entirely in Movable Type, provides visitors with a profile and a place - called Stuff - to save the items they like and want to follow up on. It also provides a place - called Answers - where visitors can exchange tips and advice with each other on such topics as grooming, style, and other important manly subjects.
Have a look at our case study to see how Uncrate has grown and prospered on Movable Type since its start in 2005. You may come closer to understanding yourself what it is that men want.

Announcing availability of MT 4.3: Faster performance, powerful search, dramatically more page views

2009-07-29T21:08:42Z

Movable Type 4.3 is now available, and it's snappy. This release makes composing, publishing, and searching in Movable Type easier than ever. In fact, we strongly recommend that you update your software as soon as possible to enjoy the benefits of this new release.

Here's why:

Performance for all publishing is faster than ever.
Your readers can now find content by author or date range (something Google's site search doesn't do) with the powerful new search feature.
You can create a new site based on an existing one in just a few clicks with smarter blog cloning.
Page views can increase by more than 50% with the new flexible pagination for comments and entries (based on the testing of one of our clients.)
It's faster to insert and re-use photos in your posts, and simple to create slide shows, with the most powerful asset manager ever.
Documentation is more comprehensive and easy to access than ever before. You can read about our documentation improvement efforts on MovableType.org.

The new software is currently in your Movable Type account and on the website for download.

There are plenty more technical details about this release over on the community blog at movabletype.org. Please have a look and let us know what you think.

Looking ahead to MT5

2009-07-08T04:01:09Z

We are happy to announce that Movable Type 5 is coming and invite you to participate. But first, here’s some information on what’s in store for Movable Type 4. Later this month, on July 29th, we'll be releasing Movable Type 4.3. This release contains comment pagination, a variety of bug fixes and some significant performance and scalability improvements that make it the most robust release ever on MT. We'll let you know when 4.3 is ready for download on the 29th. In the meantime, work has begun on MT5. We have started the requirements process and early development work on MT5 with particular focus on better content management and ease of use. As we gear up towards the first Movable Type Pro 5.0 beta release in the coming months we invite you to get involved. The best way is to use MT forums, send us feedback directly, or get active on our ProNet email list and tell us what you'd like to see. We are very excited about MT5 and look forward to your input!

Recording Now Available: The Marketing Benefits of Social Media

2009-06-26T16:55:51Z

Thanks to all of you who attended Wednesday's online seminar for marketers, The Marketing Benefits of Social Media. Our chief evangelist Anil Dash was joined by social media pro extraordinnaire Lauren Kozak, who directs social media for one of the most recognized and highly valued brands in the world: Britney Spears. Anil and Lauren discussed why companies should engage in social media, shared best practices they have learned over years of using social media, and illustrated how to successfully implement a social media plan with some excellent case studies of Comcast, Wells Fargo, Britney Spears, Coca Cola, Amazon, and Cisco. They also answered several excellent questions from the audience.

We were pleased to see that three out of four of you who answered the post-event survey said you were inspired to try new forms of social media or augment your existing social media efforts. We hope that you'll contact us if you'd like to establish a social media platform that can serve as your home base amongst your various social media activities, and/or if you'd like to reach influential bloggers and their readers similar to the way that Cisco has been doing in the Million Acts of Green campaign.

If you missed the event, you can listen to it here - the password is "Marketing". We value your feedback so please tell us what you think in comments, or fill out the post-event survey.

Our next online seminar is planned for later this summer. If you’d like to be notified when the date has been set please email us at info@sixapart.com and we'll send you an invite.

Thanks.

Successful Social Media: Join Our Online Seminar

2009-06-15T13:00:20Z

Everybody's talking about Social Media. But who's succeeding at it, and how are they doing it?

We've invited an expert, who happens to use Movable Type, to help answer those questions in an online seminar on Wednesday, June 24, at 11 am Pacific/ 2 pm Eastern. Besides managing social media for Britney Spears, a billion-dollar brand, Lauren Kozak has advised businesses on the most effective use of social media for years. Anil Dash, our Chief Evangelist and social media practitioner extraordinaire, will moderate the event.

We'll share many case studies as we talk about how you can use social media to acquire and retain customers, save precious brand and product research dollars, reduce marketing and IT costs, and build and defend your brand.

This seminar focuses on social media for CMOs and corporate communications, brand and product executives, however all are welcome to attend regardless of job title.

We hope you'll join us for Let's Get Social: The Marketing Benefits of Social Media. You can register here.

The San Francisco Appeal Starts Up with Movable Type

2009-06-12T18:38:02Z

Eve Batey, formerly with the Gothamist network news site SFist and most recently with the San Francisco Chronicle*, launched new online newspaper The San Francisco Appeal a few months ago. The SF Appeal provides comprehensive coverage of local news and events, which means if you’re wondering about the latest on anything to do with San Francisco, this is the place to go. Eve recently came by to talk with us about working with the Six Apart Services and Media teams to build the site and drive revenue by placing quality ads on it. Eve also shared how Movable Type will help her grow her business as she expands coverage and how it helps her team be the first to get photos online during time-sensitive events like protests and, of course, the annual Bay to Breakers extravaganza.

We'll let her tell the story. Have a look.

** Both Gothamist and San Francisco Chronicle also use Movable Type. Thank you to both organizations!

Movable Type 4.26 is Now Available: An Optional Performance Release

2009-06-10T23:15:11Z

We want to let you all know that Movable Type 4.26 is now available. This is an optional performance release which includes bug fixes and feature improvements.

Movable Type 4.26 is recommended for Movable Type Enterprise 4.x customers because it provides dramatically better search performance for large datasets and improves background publishing performance and reliability (i.e. TheSchwartz). You can review the release notes on movabletype.org for full details on all changes. We recommend only updating to 4.26 if the documented changes will directly impact you.

Movable Type Update Advisor: Version 4.26

Release Type: Performance Release. This update fixes bugs and improves existing features. No new features are included.
Mandatory? No. This is an optional upgrade recommended for Movable Type Enterprise users.
Performance Implications: Better search performance for large datasets and improved reliability and performance around TheSchwartz.
Plugins Affected: None. Current plugins should continue to work as expected.
Templates Affected: None.
System Requirements: This release has no new or additional system requirements.
Licensing considerations: None. Movable Type 4.26 is a free update for users of any version of MT 4.x.
Upgrade Fatigue: No further mandatory updates are planned for 2009. Optional releases may become available.

Downloads are available in your account for current customers or through the download page.

Social Media Tips from a True Pro

2009-05-11T22:00:29Z

Lauren Kozak, Social Media Director for Britney Spears, recently stopped by our offices and shared her views about how corporations can use social media to grow their brands and engage with customers in meaningful ways. We enjoyed her talk so much that we videotaped some of her advice to share with you. Lauren's advice is the real thing - it not only comes from her current experience creating social media success for one of the biggest brands in the world, but also from her pre-Britney Spears work as a social media advisor to corporations when the medium was still in its infancy. We hope you find Lauren's insights helpful. Let us know what you think!

Six Apart Hosts Online Seminar: Strategic Social Media in a Customer-Driven World

2009-04-24T12:54:27Z

Update on 4/24: Here's the link to the recording of the seminar. Let us know what you think.

Update: Thanks to the hundreds of you who attended the seminar. Please leave a comment and tell us what you thought. Or please fill out our survey here. We'll post the link to the recording as soon as it is ready. Thanks!

This morning at 10 am Pacific we’ll host a seminar for marketers that looks at how companies can easily and quickly join their customers online in conversation. We’ll show many examples of companies that are already building their brands, nurturing relationships with customers, increasing sales and cutting costs through social media. The seminar will be led by Anil Dash, Chief Evangelist for Six Apart. If you haven’t signed up yet, you can do so here.

After the event, please check back here to get the link to the recording and to discuss the content. We’re interested in your experience with social media in marketing.

Comcast joins the Conversation

2009-04-10T13:39:20Z

Comcast’s digital approach to customer support has certainly attracted a lot of positive media attention recently, from both mainstream and online outlets. What a contrast from a year ago, when a video of a Comcast repairman who accidentally dozed off on a customer's couch made the rounds in snickering blogs and emails. Congratulations to the Comcast team for starting to steer a very large ship away from a potentially endless negative current.

Check out the BusinessWeek article that covers a Twitter-ful afternoon with director of digital care Frank Eliason. Or the report by TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington last weekend of getting frustrated on the phone with Comcast customer’s support, only to find that a simple Tweet would deliver a solution to his problem in minutes.

Considering the company’s success on Twitter, it’s not surprising that they are augmenting their social media strategy by adding a blog to encourage longer-than-140-character conversations between Comcast customers and employees about all things Comcast.

The blog is called ComcastVoices, and it’s on Movable Type. It was launched just two weeks ago, and already the conversations are proving to be lively, informative, and respectful.

Let the folks at Comcast tell you directly what they’d like to achieve with the site:

For you marketing and customer support pros out there who might find the idea of such openness with customers a little daunting, here are a few things to note about the blog:

Comcast can set the tone and keep the conversation productive because this is their platform.

The “Rules of the Road” define expected behavior for the site. It’s very clear that comments are moderated by Comcast and that only polite, on-topic and respectful comments will be accepted.
The “About” page tells customers what they can expect from the blog, and refers them elsewhere for their personal support issues while encouraging them to tell Comcast directly what’s important to them.

You can see the negative comments of some customers turning positive as they engage in conversation with employees. For customers, simply being heard goes a long way.

It’s hard to view Comcast as a monolithic, monopolistic behemoth when you see and hear from employees and executives directly.

As we mentioned, the blog is still young, so we wish Comcast as much success with it as they’ve had with their Twitter account. And we hope that other companies will be inspired to open up new conversations with their customers in the same way.

Welcome, Comcast!