The public release of Movable Type is around the corner. We have completed the first phase of beta testing, and we will be entering the second beta phase soon. The first public version of Movable Type will be released on Monday, October 8, 2001.

We have to admit that we fell a bit behind with the development of the system. We actually forced ourselves to take a week off in order to deal with the events of the eleventh. While we did come to the conclusion that most things -- including a weblogging content management system -- are a bit trivial, we realized that we needed to go back to the metaphorical mines in order to regain some sort of normalcy in our daily routine.

Some screenshots of the MOVABLE TYPE interface, particularly those associated with entry creation and editing.

Blog administration main menu

Edit categories screen

List entries screen

Create new entry screen

Edit entries screen

More to come, including: the individual blog editing menu, the list/edit templates screen and the add/edit blog authors screen.

For those who so prefer, you can now reach this site via the URL:

http://www.moveabletype.org

A big thanks goes out to all those who linked to MOVABLE TYPE and made us #2 over at Blogdex. The response has been great and we're even more motivated to release a quality product.

Additionally, thanks to all of you who have signed up to beta-test!

If you haven't heard from us yet, please be patient. We're in the process of developing a list of questions concerning your experience with weblogging applications and weblogging in general. This way, we'll be able to accurately gauge any issues or concerns that arise once official testing begins.

In the meantime, keep sending in feature requests and comments.

MOVABLE TYPE is written in Perl, so you will need Perl installed on your system in order to run MOVABLE TYPE. Perl is installed by default on most servers, so it is very likely that your system will already have it. In addition, you will need 6 Perl modules, 5 of which are installed along with Perl--so if you have Perl, you will have these 5 modules. The last required module (HTML::Template) is installed on many hosting providers, and can be downloaded and installed easily otherwise.

The MOVABLE TYPE system runs as a CGI script, so you will need the ability to run CGI scripts on your account.

MOVABLE TYPE uses a flexible, transparent backend for data storage; currently, the only working backend uses Berkeley DB files and the DB_File Perl module, both installed by default on many systems. Future enhancements will include storage in relational databases, for example.

Among the expected features of a weblogging content management system (hosted locally on your server, template driven, highly-configurable, permalinks...), the first release of MOVABLE TYPE will have incorporated these added features.

• Extensible, library-driven code.
• Multiple output templates to enable one-click publishing to multiple destinations.
• Entry categorization and grouping.
• Built-in support for RSS syndication.
• Custom variable and template inclusion, for encapsulation of commonly used HTML.
• Support for multiple weblogs/journals.
• Multiple archiving options: daily/weekly/monthly/categorical, or each entry on its own individual page.
• Comment system, either inline or in popup windows; ability to exclude commenting on certain posts.
• Notification on new entries: maintain lists of users to whom notification messages can be sent when you post a new or specific entry.
• Date stamp override allows you to pre-date or post-date your entries.

Plus these currently-in-development features planned for subsequent versions:

• Popup image/file upload interface
  
• Activity Log
  
• XML-RPC and/or SOAP interface
  
• Blog cloning
  
• Automatic backups
  
• FTP files to remote host
  

Stay tuned for more information.

You've found MOVABLE TYPE. What started as a pet personal project has grown into something that we decided to release upon the weblogging masses.

I know, you're probably saying "not another weblogging management system."

Hopefully some of our features will make this seem as exciting to you as it does to us. But, really, maybe we're just excited because it's our project.

-Ben & Mena