The New Boing Boing: Powered by MT4

Boing Boing is one of the biggest breakout successes in the history of blogging. From its roots as a zine cofounded by Mark Frauenfelder and Carla Sinclair to its presence today as one of the most popular blogs ever, the site has exceeded all expectations. Guided by Mark, along with David Pescovitz, Cory Doctorow, and Xeni Jardin, Boing Boing has influenced not just the blogosphere, but culture as a whole, leading the conversation on topics ranging from intellectual property to oddball gadgets to the fringes of art on the web.

And today, we’ve made them our Movable Type Featured Blog to celebrate the fact that they’ve relaunched on Movable Type 4.0. They’re using some of the most powerful features of the platform:

• MT4’s built-in user registration features let Boing Boing create its own database of registered users. Andif they want to support OpenID in the future as as sign-in option, MT4 has OpenID authentication built in.
• MT4’s ability to manage an unlimited number of blogs in one installation made it easy to launch Boing Boing Gadgets, which can share logins and management functions with Boing Boing itself. BB Gadgets is helmed by Joel Johnson, who’s no stranger to the big leagues of gadget blogs — he used MT every day as former editor of Gizmodo.
• MT4’s powerful comment management capabilities give new Boing Boing team member Teresa Nielsen Hayden the ability to oversee the site’s rambunctious and vibrant community. (You know Teresa from her venerable MT-powered blog Making Light.) And with MT’s multi-blog support, Teresa can manage comment on both Boing Boing blogs in one place.
• MT4’s flexible new templating features let our friends at Federated Media and Apperceptive take advantage of some unique features to help build the site’s new look. Cross-blog aggregation makes it easy to include content from more than one blog, and improvements to the templating language simplified the ability to choose exactly which content appears on each page.

There are, of course, many more people involved in a launch of this scale — Federated Media’s team played a pivotal role in everything from implementation to the business side of the launch, and you can read a bit about that on FM’s MT-powered blog. Jemma Hostetler created an amazing design that honors Boing Boing’s history while giving it a fresh, new look. And we’ve talked to Six Apart Professional Network members Apperceptive in a little more depth in an interview on our Professional Network site which talks a bit about the opportunities they’ve found in working with MT4 on sites like Boing Boing.

All of us on the Movable Type team at Six Apart are extremely proud to have played a small role in helping reinvent Boing Boing, and we’re thrilled that it does such a great job of showing what smart, talented bloggers can do with the power of Movable Type 4.