Joining The Mission

When we launched the first beta of Movable Type 4 more than two months ago, we explained that we’re on a mission. The ideas were simple, but we’ve collected some of the early responses to MT4 which demonstrate how good tools, combined with a mission that we all share, have already helped inspire some great excitement about what’s possible.

From that earlier post:

[The] 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.

Put simply, we’re a company founded by bloggers, dedicated to the idea that putting more powerful communications tools into the hands of as many people as possible can have a positive, transformative effect on the world. Good communications brings people closer together.

What’s been exciting to see is that so many of you have responded to the mission we have for Movable Type 4.0 and for Six Apart as a whole. Here’s some early takes:

From CMS Wire (which is powered by Movable Type):

MT4 isn’t just unique in terms of its origins and functionality; it also represents a renewed and significant commitment by Six Apart to stand behind and invest in the product, and their core manifesto of blogging for all. A recurring theme with this release has been Six Apart’s ability to match enterprise demands with the free-wheeling desires of the less commercial bloggers.

Matt Grove weighed in:

MT4. Painless. Easy. Quick. Done. … The Movable Type 4 upgrade last night took quite literally about 3 minutes to complete… I love the fact I no longer have to write every entry with my own HTML, have a nice ajax-y interface to upload files, the site still looks great and doesn’t seem to have been affected by the upgrade whatsoever - exactly what a techie like me expects from good quality open source code ! All the new functionality is really, really good. Makes life easier to blog, so perhaps I’ll do it more ;-)

Sara at Serialpurrs gets to the heart of it:

Thank you all at Six Apart for making blogging fun again.

And the response during the beta of MT4 was just as strong. One of the most fun comments was from longtime community member Dan Sanderson: “Movable Type 4 is officially awesome.”

We’ve been bowled over by the amazing response, and the community site shows how plugin developers and designers have been just as inspired by the new energy that’s accompanied the release. Thanks to everyone who’s chimed in over the past few days, and we can’t wait to see what you do next with MT4.