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.