Movable Type 4 Beta: We're On A Mission

If you’re reading this blog, you probably know a lot about Movable Type. It’s the power bloggers’ tool, made by people who just wanted to make a good, flexible blogging application. Over half a decade, it’s grown into a platform that even enterprises and global businesses use to publish to the world. Today, we’re returning to the mission that started Movable Type in the first place, building a community that wants to make the best, most influential blogs in the world.

It begins today with the Movable Type 4 beta release, a real beta process that will collect your suggestions, improvements, feedback, and most of all the passion of all of you in our community. We’re just at the start of that process, and we’ve already put in more resources than have ever gone into any version of MT.

If you just want the details and features and good stuff, there’s a free beta version to play with, and you’ll find out about all kinds of cool new features:

• A completely reinvented user interface with a dashboard overview of how all of your blogs are doing
• Support for publishing standalone pages and managing file assets and images right within MT
• Brand-new community features like OpenID, and a built-in user registration system
• A completely redesigned component architecture that makes MT faster and more scalable than ever before
• And it’s going to be available in a completely open source version with its home at a completely relaunched community site that revives an old, beloved URL: movabletype.org.

But before you dive into all the usual blogosphere chatter about what’s new and what needs fixing and how the features stack up, we wanted to explain why we’ve made this massive investment in Movable Type and its community. The truth is, Movable Type is how Six Apart got started, and one of those ideas that motivated us from the very beginning is that we’ve got a mission.

The Mission

Blogging has made a huge difference in our lives at Six Apart, but had even more impact on the millions of members of our communities. And our mission is to bring the power and potential of blogs to as many people as possible.

To tell you the truth, it’s been a complicated path. Our core audience of Movable Type users, starting back in 2001, gave us two very clear messages.

1. You wanted all of the coolest new features and gee-whiz web gagdets to help make your blog as flexible as possible.
2. You asked us to help get your friends and family and coworkers and maybe even your bosses to start blogging, to discover this medium for themselves.

You were tired of media that didn’t respond to the world you live in, and frustrated by companies that only used broadcast communications to talk to you. You didn’t think that keeping in touch with family and friends, or sharing ideas with like-minded people, should be limited by geography.

So we set out to reach all of those people, to teach them what MT users have always known, that blogs can help change the way we communicate. The change isn’t always 100% for the better, but it is definitely new, and over time, the benefits become clear.

Getting the word out

We have three tools other than Movable Type here at Six Apart: TypePad, LiveJournal and Vox. Each of them was designed to reach people Movable Type couldn’t connect to. And now that they’re all on the path to getting their audiences, we can take their technology, and the lessons they’ve taught us, and bring them back to Movable Type.

We started TypePad four years ago, to get a lot of the power that MT users had experienced into the hands of people who didn’t want to install software, and it’s evolved into a tool for serious bloggers, as well as great option for small businesses and even big-name publishers to get the word out without the technical requirements.

When the LiveJournal team joined Six Apart, it was a crash course in community, one that’s been challenging at times, but has also been immensely rewarding as we start to see what helps people really connect with each other at a human level. And it doesn’t hurt that the LiveJournal team invented a lot of the technology that’s helped grow not just our communities, but all of Web 2.0.

The success of all those Web 2.0 communities is something that greatly influenced our efforts in Vox, where the community lessons of LiveJournal were combined with one of the messages that our Movable Type community taught us early on: Sometimes we just want to talk privately to our friends and family, even when we’re blogging. A lot of the biggest challenges in blogging have come from not being able to direct the right conversations to the right groups of people, and so we’ve spent a lot of time trying to meet that need.

Bringing it all back home

Which brings us back to Movable Type. As we’ve worked on each of these platforms, we’ve learned a great deal about what our earliest audience needed to move forward. From TypePad, it’s easy to understand how we can bring over elements like listing screens into Movable Type and efficiently reuse bits of the application. That makes it quicker to bring out new features, by reducing the amount of time they take to develop. But we’ve also learned a lot about power bloggers wanting to manage the non-blog content of their site, like standalone pages and media assets, right within the same tool. So powerful media management is built right in to MT4.

From LiveJournal, we’ve learned how important it is to support open, engaged communities, and so we’ve brought over technologies like OpenID and support for Memcached. But we’ve also seen what amazing contributions the open source community makes, and how much more comfortable people feel knowing that, instead of data lock-in keeping them tied to their blog, an open process of development makes them want to participate. And that’s greatly influenced MT4’s new open source initiative: Later this year the open source version ofMovable Type will be released under the GPL license.

And then from Vox, we’ve learned what it’s like to rethink the blogging experience completely, redesigning the user interface around the idea of presenting the information that matters. It should be effortless to share all the rich media content that makes the web so compelling, and connecting to the rest of our communities on the web should be easy. MT4’s completely new user interface bears witness to that influence.

Where we’re going next

All of these efforts have culminated in something pretty remarkable: That original audience of MT users has helped blogging become an incontrovertible success, in every realm from individual people talking to friends and family, to communities forming around every conceivable interest, to independent businesses being able to promote their efforts to the world. We measure success by how many new people we help to start blogging, and when we first launched Movable Type, there were almost no newspapers, television stations, radio broadcasters or publishers blogging. Today, nearly all of them are doing so, with many of them powered by Movable Type.

And those of you in that core audience of MT users, the individuals who’ve become “blog stars” and helped inspire a lot of these other successes along the way? We think you’ll all find a lot to love about MT4 and the revitalized community as well. Those of you who are newer to the community: Welcome. We think you’ll find there are some amazingly creative and innovative peers for you here.

In the coming days, we’ll get into the details of what’s new in MT4, and all the blogging goodness it contains. But this release of MT4 has been a long time coming, and we wanted to explain where our inspiration came from, to help set the stage for where our community is going next. We can’t wait to hear what you think, and hope you’ll check out what we’ve got so far.. Thanks for coming along.

Update: A number of users are telling us that when they access www.movabletype.org they see content from movabletype.com. It is possible that DNS changes made to facilitate the launch of the beta and the new website have not fully propagated. In the meantime, users should be able to access the website at the following alternate URL: beta.movabletype.org.