As you might know, WordPress 2.5 is about to be released, and we wanted to encourage WordPress users to upgrade. To Movable Type.

The truth is, there are lots of good blogging tools out there, and they're all good at different things. But since upgrading from older versions to WP 2.5 can mean changes to your themes, plugins ("print your plugins list"!), and site, we thought we'd take a minute to explain why it may make sense to make those changes in Movable Type instead. For those people in the blogging community who've never taken a look, or who haven't seen MT in a while, you might just find some surprises.

Get Better Tech First

If you're into the technology of blogging, you've probably been hearing about technologies like Atom and OpenID for a while, and paying attention to newer innovations from Action Streams to iPhone interfaces to OAuth. But for things like Atom and OpenID, WordPress users have had to wait months or even years to get capabilities that Movable Type has pioneered. If you want OpenID commenting support on your blog today, Movable Type has had it built right in since the initial launch of MT4 last year -- we got a little bit of a head start there because Six Apart is where OpenID was invented. And we're not resting on our laurels; support for the newly-updated OpenID 2.0 specification is coming to MT shortly as well. Powerful new web services connected by OAuth are also right around the corner, letting you to keep control of your password without having to share it all around the web just because you want to try out a new web service on your blog.

This kind of stuff isn't new for us: Movable Type was the first an early blogging platform to support plugins at all. [Update: As always, we should have assumed Dave Winer got there first -- Manila had plugins much earlier.] MT was the first to have support for Creative Commons built right in. And it's not just that we participate within existing open source communities to create new standards like Atom, OpenID 2, and OAuth, we also work with companies all over the web to be partners on the OpenSocial project and [a totally non-evil implementation of] Facebook's Beacon on TypePad. Basically, we think that playing well with others makes for a better platform.

Takes a Digging, Keeps on Ticking.

Question: How should you greet the onrush of visitors to your site when you get onto the homepage of Digg or Reddit? Answer: Not with a Database Connection Error. A lot of people have asked us over the years, "Why does MT default to generating static web pages?", even though there's the option to publish fully dynamic pages. The reason is clear, as WordPress core developer and Automattic employee Donncha O Caoimh says, "[U]nder high load, serving static html files will always trump dynamic PHP requests." With Movable Type, the default settings have always been set so that you have a site that's reliable right when you're about to get the most traffic, without having to hunt down, install, or configure any plugins. So when a crowd of people come to your site, they can read what you wrote (and click on your ads, if you're into that sort of thing) instead of wondering what everybody was looking at.

A Dashboard That Measures Success

One of the biggest goals in redesigning our dashboard for Movable Type 4 nearly a year ago was to get out of the habit of merely listing a bunch of recent entries, comments, and pages. The truth is, you need those listing screens to manage your blogs, but on a dashboard that stuff just ends up looking like another inbox full of clutter to manage. So MT4's completely customizable dashboard has a powerful set of visual representations of your blog's behavior, from charts of the number of entries your authors have created to sliders that let you zoom in and understand why you got more comments on certain days. And of course there are lots of third-party plugins for the MT dashboard, to integrate statistics and information from third-party services like your number of FeedBurner subscribers.

Design Matters

Movable Type was the first blogging platform to use completely CSS-styled, standards-based templates by default, and since then we've worked like crazy to give smarter, prettier tools to everybody for customizing design. We have a strong belief that creating a theme or editing a design shouldn't require knowing PHP or figuring out whether parameters go in the order of "format, before, after" or "before, after, format". In fact, template tags shouldn't be writing HTML markup for you at all -- so in MT, they don't. And the tools for managing and customizing those designs look as good as the designs themselves, as you can see with the Movable Type Design Assistant. The Assistant is designed to help regular bloggers think about their blog's design with some of the insights and perspectives of a professional designer. And the StyleCatcher system built into Movable Type lets you install styles from repositories on the web, without having to manually upload a bunch of theme files to your server.

Plugins Are Good. Not Needing Plugins Is Better.

As the platform that first popularized blogging plugins, Movable Type has tons of them. But even better, there are a huge number of features that would require either the installation and configuration of a plugin, or moving to a completely different platform like WP-MU if you were using WordPress. Instead of wasting time trying to install all those plugins, and then keeping up with the inevitable security updates for them, or compatibility updates whenever you upgrade your software, you can use MT's built-in features and just worry about what you want to say. Some of the key features that are built in to MT that you might want to try out:

• Manage an unlimited number of blogs with one install
• Share templates and widgets across all the blogs in your system
• Easily manage tags
• Upload, manage, and tag any kind of files with a complete Asset Manager
• Lots more items that are still on the WordPress wishlist, like image resizing, searching of posts and pages, OpenID, a customizable dashboard, a better WYSIWYG editor, and more

And when you finally do want to do more with your site, in addition to all of the plugins which are available, you can also add in extensions to the platform like the Movable Type Enterprise Solution, for integrating with business-grade infrastructure, and Movable Type Community Solution, which enables features like user profiles, forums, Digg-style ratings, recommendations, and more.

Get Support Right From The Source

One of the signature features of Movable Type is perhaps the most hidden: Our excellent support. Instead of search around on Google for information that may or may not be out of date, or trying to figure out an obscure chat channel to get answers, paid users can simply file a help ticket and get access to the best support team in the business. It's just one more way to focus on what you want to say with your blog, instead of fighting with technology problems.

And Lots More To Come...

Now, the truth is, we're far from perfect. There are still a lot of times when MT installation takes a lot more than five minutes, though we're working on fixing that. (But of course, having a lot fewer security updates means you're not updating your blogging software all the time, so it can even out.) And MT can import all of your WordPress entries, comments, pages, and content with no problems. Right now, our whole developer community is focused on improving the raw performance of the core platform. But there are also still tons of new features we want to add to the platform as soon as possible. Whether it's adding support for OpenID 2.0, OAuth, or OpenSocial, making the application faster and more responsive, or working with the community to bring users new themes and plugins, we're 100% focused on our responsibility to continue to invent the future of blogging.

Movable Type is a blogging platform that's reliable, innovative, beautifully-designed and full-featured.  Having spent years being both inspired and humbled by the creativity of the blogging community, we'd also like to point out that Movable Type might just be the right platform for a blogger like you.

Movable Type is well-known for letting you easily build beautiful websites, but what may not be as obvious is that your Movable Type skills can help you build a successful career.

• Maintaining and extending several Movable Type and PHP-based Web sites featuring science and biology-oriented content
• Managing a junior staff member who's primary foci are end-user support for a staff of 15-30 and Web site maintenance
• Serving as IT Department liaison to Department Managers (3-5) in the headquarters office, working to understand needs, propose effective solutions, arrive at consensus, and implement
• Manage (and assist with management of) relationships/contracts with vendors supporting technology infrastructure for the headquarters office, and vendors assisting with technology project implementation
• Assuming responsibility for technology infrastructure maintenance and growth for non-IT staff

Seeing the maintenance of a Movable Type publishing infrastructure as the first responsibility in a job description shows the transformation that's happened. We've come a long way from "I hope the new IT hire knows a little bit of HTML, too." And whether you're interested in hanging out with scientist at AIBS, or working for a major media company, or bootstrapping an up-and-coming new blog network, we're working to make sure that having "Experience with Movable Type" on your resume is something that distinguishes you from the rest of the field.

As we continue through our list of what's new in Movable Type 4.0, one of the innovations that's had the community most excited is the built-in support for OpenID authentication for commenters. We've been talking about the momentum around OpenID for months -- over 100 million identities are OpenID-compatible today. And now, with MT4, any of those users can sign in to comment on your blog without having to create a new login or password: Movable Type 4 includes OpenID authentication for your commenters, built right in.

On top of general OpenID support, MT4 lets you add in service-specific plugins to provide even smoother integration between third-party OpenID-enabled services and your MT-powered site. Of course Movable Type 4 also provides its own built-in authentication service, if you choose. But some of the coolest options are the ones from other sites -- out of the box, MT4 has authentication integration for:

• Movable Type's built-in registration
  
• Generic OpenID
• LiveJournal
• TypeKey (includes all TypePad users)

But the energy that the MT4 community has shown since the platform's launch is reflected in OpenID support, as well. Community member Minh Nguyá»…n has created an OpenID connector for AIM and AOL logins. That's almost 90 million potential users who don't have to create a password to sign in on your blog's comments! And our own Byrne Reese, product manager for Movable Type, has stepped to the plate with a WordPress OpenID Login plugin for MT4, which supports anyone using the wordpress.com service. Both of these are made possible through MT4's authentication plugin framework, which is accompanied by some spiffy new developer documentation.

We're always happy to see the industry embrace open standards, and as OpenID was first incubated at Six Apart, we're especially proud to have the first professional blogging system that's incorporated OpenID natively into the platform. We'll be watching carefully to see how you use OpenID on your sites, and expanding our support even further in the future.

We’ve got a lot of different audiences for our blogging tools at Six Apart, and Movable Type might have the broadest of them all — it bridges everything from individual hackers running MT on their laptops to giant corporations running thousands of blogs on their intranets.

To the original blogging community that we come from, though, we get a lot of weird looks when we talk about how exciting it is to work on business and enterprise blogging. There are a lot of variations on the question, but basically the thing people want to know is, “Why do you guys care about business blogs so much?”

In short:

• Blogs are a better tool for the job for a lot of business communications.
• Using blogs at work will help people discover uses for blogs in the rest of their lives.
• Nobody else can do it, and we can’t afford to leave it up to companies that don’t care about blogging.

The longer answer is, we’re immensely greedy monsters! No, no, that’s not right — the truth is a lot simpler: If it’s done right, making blogs work for businesses helps get more people blogging (that’s our mission, remember?), and it makes a day at work just a little bit more pleasant for a lot of people.

Using the tools they give you

Because while those of us who work on our own or for smaller companies can say “Well, I want to work on a Mac.” or “I’m only going to use Firefox.” or “I’m only going to use open source applications.” (and most of us at Six Apart fall into those camps), most non-technical people not only don’t have that option, they don’t care enough to find out how to do that stuff. You use what your boss tells you to, and even if you have other preferences, they’re not worth the fight when you’re just trying to get your job done.

So, instead of having to use some horrible “Groupware Knowledge Management Content Solution Server” thing, we think people should be able to use real blogs from a company that actually cares about blogging. And to do that, we have to make blogging tools feel “safe” to bosses and CIOs and CTOs and IT departments and other offices full of people whose job it is to say “no” to anything too new or unproven.

As a result, we get a little bit of skepticism on both sides. People who are zealots, who see blogging as some kind of religion, say it can’t possibly be “real” blogging if it’s integrated with enterprise software or portals or Microsoft Office or things like that. And conservative technologists who want to manage risk in a global business say it can’t possibly be a reliable business tool if it comes from a community of hackers and idealists and, well, troublemakers.

We think we’ve reached a good compromise if both sides are a little bit skeptical, but still willing to be pleasantly surprised.

Updating web pages is still pretty damn difficult

Outside of the blogosphere’s echo chamber, most people who want to publish a page on their intranet at work are still stuck asking a geek down the hall to make the changes, and then waiting 3 weeks for it to happen, and another 3 weeks for the fixes for the mistakes in the first update. Those people deserve a tool as powerful and simple as blogs, if only to help preserve their sanity. And just maybe, some of those people will start to think “Hey, there really is something interesting about blogging.”

For the normal people, the ones who kind of maybe have heard of blogs, but certainly haven’t tried them out yet themselves, discovering blogging as part of work will lead them to thinking about how blogs can change every part of their life. It’s just like the millions of people who first used a web browser as part of their job, or the people who had an email address at work or school before they ever signed up for Hotmail or Gmail.

An obligation to the community

There’s one final point that’s probably worth mentioning: We bring blogs to businesses of every size because nobody else can. That’s not bragging — it’s just a reflection of how new this medium (still!) is. The giant multi-billion-dollar technology companies don’t care about blogging, so they aren’t going to spend time and effort to educate people about it. (Especially if it comes at the expense of Groupware Knowledge Management Content Solution Server.)

And individuals who work with blogs don’t have the resources to educate companies on a global scale about the potential of blogging, or to build up a sales and support team to back up business customers, or to partner with the Oracles and HPs and Intels of the world. We’ve done all of these things, to show businesses that blogs are credible business tools.

It’s probably an obvious point, but making blogs business-ready isn’t sexy work. Almost no coders think “Man, I can’t wait to go home and hack on middleware integration this weekend!” But bringing blogging to a bigger audience, an audience that’s still skeptical of this medium, and unfamiliar with its potential, takes exactly that kind of hard, unsexy work. As a company founded by bloggers, that’s benefited so much from blogging, we frankly felt it was our responsibility to help as many other people and companies benefit as possible. So that’s why we do it. We might not always get geek cred from cynical, jaded bloggers for it, but there are a couple hundred million other people out there who might see the benefits. And that’s pretty fantastic.

The fact is, blogs are a better, cheaper tool for businesses to use for many types of communication. But they’re also still a young tool that most companies haven’t even gotten a moment’s thought from most businesses yet. We think our community can change that, and we hope this gives you a little bit better understanding of why it’s important that all of us succeed in the effort.

Ok, here’s a fun little blog mention that we’d been meaning to post after last week’s season finale episode of The Office. If you watch the NBC show, you’ll be familiar with the dark-hearted fan-favorite character Creed Bratton. In the finale, it’s revealed that Ryan had helped Creed set up a “blog”.

Of course (spoilers!) the blog itself turned out to just be an address at the top of a Word document. www.creedthoughts.gov.www\creedthoughts wouldn’t have worked very well as a web address anyway.

But good news! Because NBC has a number of Movable Type Enterprise blogs for all their shows, they made quick work of setting up a real blog for Creed Thoughts. The show’s on hiatus for the summer now, of course, but there have already been some updates since the finale, sowe’re hoping the real Creed Bratton will keep blogging again once the show’s back in the fall. The idea has our inner Kelly Kapoor so excited!

(And don’t worry, Schrute fans, Dwight’s got a blog, too. Only he doesn’t like the word “blog”.)

A few years ago, Spider-Man came out and did a brilliant job of showing off the classic character, making it okay to really enjoy a “comic book movie” again. This summer’s sequel, Spider-Man 3 opens tomorrow and seems to be a lock for the first blockbuster film of the season. So naturally, we’re thrilled to make the Spider-Man 3 Official Movie Blog our Movable Type Featured Blog.

The Spider-Man 3 blog is full of the kind of content you’d expect — links to trailers, feeds for fans to subscribe to, and behind-the-scenes videos that show off the making of the film. But innovation abounds all over Sony’s efforts on the blog. There’s smart use of Movable Type’s categories feature to highlight content that includes rich media. You can find extensive use of embedded video to include clips right within the blog. And the team has reached out to the entire blogosphere by providing beautifully designed templates for use on your blog, including Movable Type templates, exclusive designs for LiveJournal users, and the first independent designs we’ve seen any major film create for the Vox community.

But most importantly, the Spider-Man 3 blog really embraces community. Nearly all of the entries tell stories of how fans are excited about the film, what they’ve done to enter or win contests, or what their experiences have been as the film gets ready to launch. Congratulations to the fans and filmmakers who’ve done some heroic web-slinging to help create and launch the Spider-Man 3 Official Movie Blog.

There are lots of discussions about how newspapers need to evolve, and many of them focus on the lessons traditional news outlets can learn from blogs — how to update more frequently, accept submissions and comments from readers, or how to make archived content easier to discover and share.

Well, the Buckinghamshire Advertiser in southeast England has taken those lessons to heart in relaunching its web presence: The newspaper’s site is now published entirely with Movable Type. And that makes the Buckinghamshire Advertiser today’s Movable Type Featured Blog.

There are often debates about this sort of thing — if you’re using a tool like Movable Type, which is platform designed for blogging, but it’s being used as a general content management system, is the output still a blog? Our answer: Who cares? The important thing is that the Advertiser’s staff has an easy way to share news and updates with their community, and the Buckinghamshire community has a simpler way to keep up to day. The Press Gazette offers an astute analysis:

Trinity Mirror has clearly realised that properly customised blogging tools can do everything that a much more expensive content management system would be able to. The web developers and software houses that produce complex, expensive CMSs should take note.

Just as sites like thePlatform and Seed Magazine show us, content that’s created with blogging tools doesn’t have to look like a traditional blog. All that matters is that a site connects with its audience in way that’s meaningful and useful. The Trinity Mirror team that’s relaunched the Advertiser has achieved exactly that — and the new Buckinghamshire Advertiser is ample evidence.

Werner Vogels is the Chief Technology Officer of Amazon.com, but though he has a high-profile position, he complements his official statements with his own personal thoughts on his blog All Things Distributed. Because of the intelligent way that Werner’s All Things Distributed acts as a personal complement to his professional work, it’s a great choice as today’s Movable Type Featured Blog.

What do we mean? Well, a few Six Apart folks were at O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference earlier this week, and we saw a great keynote presentation on Amazon’s web services platform. Now, we’re big believers in this kind of technology — that’s why we get so excited about things like Amazon’s TypePad widgets. But in addition to making great web services, we all have a human side to the things we write about on our blogs, even ones where the tagline claims to be a “weblog on building scalable and robust distributed systems.”

And that’s where the fantastic disclaimer at the bottom of Werner’s blog comes in. It reads, in part:

This is a personal weblog. That means that the opinions voiced here are purely personal and they do not in any way represent the opinions, experiences or directions of my employer Amazon.com. If you take any of the statements on this weblog and use it as an official statement by Amazon.com you are knowingly misleading your audience. For official statements by Amazon.com visit the Amazon.com Virtual Media Room.

If I do write something worth referencing, and you feel strongly about the need to reference my affiliation, you should also mention in your reference that this is my personal weblog: “Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com, mentions on his personal weblog that the Seahawks have a good shot at the Superbowl this year”.

If you can not play by these simple rules, please do not reference this weblog at all.

The truth of the matter is, we should be able to have personal blogs where we can speak freely without having to worry about them being a “gotcha” for the press or others to attribute our every thought as Official Corporate Policy. And while nobody can enforce a disclaimer like this one legally, it can be useful just to make the desire explicit. Best of all, getting the fine print out of the way means that we can all enjoy a chance to look inside the mind of one of the people who helps create the technology of one of the largest-scale sites on the web.

Have you found another example of someone creatively solving a problem with their blog? Submit the site and we’ll consider it as a Movable Type Featured Blog.

At last week’s BlogHer Business conference, one of the standout speakers was Redbook Editor-in-Chief Stacy Morrison. As part of the closing keynote panel on the ethos of the social media world, Stacy spoke passionately about wanting to modernize the image of Redbook, taking advantage of the fact that the brand is extremely well-known, but using social media like blogs to help show a more contemporary and relevant side of the magazine to the women who are its core audience.

So it seems only appropriate to make one of Redbook’s signature Movable Type-powered blogs our Movable Type Featured Blog for today. Take a look at You Are Here, part of the site’s “Time For You” section, which celebrates a more contemplative and introspective side of its readers. As the site describes it, “Take a moment for yourself and read what Redbook editors do with their time. Jump in, the water’s fine.”

You Are Here has a fresh design, following the aesthetics of Redbook’s entire site, and eschewing a traditional blog layout in favor of one that puts editors’ names and faces front and center. It’s a humanizing touch that seems only appropriate for the topic. And as with every section of the site, the editorial blog is complemented by a hand-picked blog directory of independent sites around the blogosphere that complement the tone and voice of Redbook’s own editorial.

With You Are Here, Redbook has kept its unique voice while moving solidly into a more contemporary mode of conversation with its readership. If you’ve had a similar success in telling your story in a new way through blogs, submit your site as a featured blog and join the conversation.

Climate change has been a… hot topic in the news, and even at the Oscars, for some time. But a lot of people who are concerned about the issue just want to know some steps they can take to help as individuals. TerraPass is an organization that lets you calculate your “carbon footprint”, or the total of the carbon dioxide emissions we create with daily activities such as driving, electricity use, or flying. And TerraPass provides the opportunity to help offset that old technology by investing in new technology that helps better the environment.

But communicating about complex issues around climate change such as renewable resources, investment in industrial efficiency and alternative energy sources is a tough task. So TerraPass uses their Movable Type-powered TerraBlog to explain the heart of their business: It’s not just a one-way channel for the company to talk about these issues, but a forum that supports a community of people who are asking the tough questions. And the company delivers their blog to their readers by leveraging Movable Type to notify their 20,000 email subscribers about new entries, and talk about relevant news of the day.

According to the staff of Terrapass “Movable Type is the core of how we do business.” It’s a ringing endorsement of the value a blog can add to your company’s relationships. If you’re using Movable Type to tell your community about your story, submit your site as a Movable Type Featured Blog and we’ll be glad to help you get the word out.