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Here's the story: Movable Type 4.1 continues the amazing momentum that the Movable Type platform showed in 2007, when we released MT4, offered up the one-two punch of the Enterprise Solution and Community Solution, and capped off our best year ever with the release of MTOS, Movable Type Open Source.

So what's next? Movable Type 4.1, a free update for all users of MT4. A stable release of Movable Type Open Source. The new Professional Pack, packed with industrial-strength content management power. And a new personal license for the MT Community Solution. More power, more potential, and more personalization. There are dozens of new features in MT 4.1, and even more unique capabilities if you opt to add on one of the packs we've made available to the community. Improvements for writing and managing assets make MT easier to use than ever, smarter tools for managing and create templates make MT's publishing even more powerful, technical improvements to APIs and the templating language extend MT's tradition of technological innovation, and support for user avatars and new add-ons for community features help turn your MT-powered site into a real community.

And then there's the new add-ons, like the Professional Pack which gives you the ability to customize the data fields for your entries, pages, users, and even categories and folders. Bundled with the smart new Universal Template set, you can build a business website in minutes, and completely control the entry forms you use to publish. Plus, the Community Solution, which we announced to a fantastic response late last year, will shortly be available for personal users, letting you add forums, profiles, user-submitted posts and more to your blog, all wrapped up in a gorgeous new set of specially-designed templates.

• Write. Now. We've cleaned up the screen where you write your entries, making the layout even smarter and easier to understand, and showing useful info like when a post was created as well as when it was published, and even if it's been edited, which is handy if you've got multiple people reviewing your content. There's even a convenient link for sharing your entries once they're published, with a friendly box for entering your recipient's email addresses, and automatic integration with MT's address book.

• Template Sets. The smartest templating system in blogging just got even smarter -- you can now install entire sets of templates, which control the output of your published content, styles, and even your XML feeds all at once. The Professional Pack (see below) includes a killer template set, but you'll be able to get template sets from the MT community at large, as well. And with new plugins, you can even create and distribute or sell your own sets. Learn more about Template Sets.
  

• Template Sanity! Ever drive yourself nuts trying to look up the right tag to use in your templates, or get frustrated trying to share elements between your different blogs or sites? No more. Global templates make it easy to share widgets or even entire templates between two, twenty, or two hundred different blogs or sites in your MT install. And intelligent tag help automatically provides you with a link to the appropriate help documentation for the template tags you use -- right within the Movable Type interface. And all that is on top of MT4's smart syntax-highlighting rich template editor, which even prompts you for the right template tags to insert while you're editing.

• The best API support in the business. MT was the first blogging platform with Atom support, and now we've got full support for the IETF Atom Publishing Protocol (RC5023) standard. Plus, we've beefed up MT's API support with the ability to create, edit, and manage pages through third-party clients like Windows Live Writer, just like you've been able to do with entries.

• Get a handle on your assets. Still struggling with an old blogging system that doesn't even help you manage your files and images? Then it's time to jump to MT4.1, which improves MT4's powerful asset management system with new screens that show you every time an asset has been used. ("This PDF is linked to in 3 of your entries." "Two of your pages have this image inserted." "This audio file hasn't been used.") And you can bulk-manage your assets, making it just a few clicks to add tags to as many files as you want.

• Show us your pics! Short for "User pictures", and also known as avatars, Userpics are built in to the system, and you can use them on your published entries, and even on your comments. And Userpics have all the power of MT4's asset management system, so you can upload, manage, and tag them just like you would any other image or photo in your system. Seeing the faces (or icons) of the members of your community goes a long way towards creating a sense of "belonging", and makes it easy to identify the regulars that help your blog's community thrive.

• Some crazy next-generation geeky stuff! This one's an experimental feature, just for the geeks: As of MT 4.1, the Movable Type templating language is now Turing Complete. MT 4.1 introduces some new looping constructs, additional variable types (like hashes and arrays) and control flow structures like If-ElseIf-Else). You can finally port Tetris to the MT template language!

• The whole damn thing is faster, and can take whatever traffic you throw at it. With all the new features in MT4, we've had to work hard to make sure the speed of managing and publishing your site stays peppy. So MT 4.1 introduces a number of new performance enhancements, like blog search results that are significantly more speedy. And as always, MT defaults to publishing standard, scalable plain HTML documents for your entries -- so you can enjoy the attention when your blog gets on Digg, instead of worrying about whether your web host is going to yell at you, or having to figure out a technical solution just to handle the traffic.

But wait, there's more!

As we mentioned with the release of Movable Type Open Source, we want to make sure our paying users know they're getting the most bang for their buck. So we're launching the Professional Pack, a benefit for all users who purchase a supported commercial license. And soon, it will be joined by a new personal license for the Community Solution, that makes it easy for you to get the power of full-featured forums, rich community blogs, and slick new member profiles for your personal blog. (In the meantime, you can check out the screencast to find out what's in the Community Pack.)

Packed With Power

The Pro Pack lets you flex your creative muscles with MT, turning the world's most powerful blogging platform into a full-fledged content management system. Some of the highlights:

• Universal Template Set for Business Websites. Your company or project can get up and running with a professionally designed website using MT's new content management features using the new universal template set. Just click to start a new site and you're automatically provided with a beautiful homepage, default pages for common information like an About page or a Contact page, and a full-featured blog. Even better, you can start customizing the content of any section of the site just by clicking on it.

• Custom Fields. Now you've got complete control over the fields that you use to publish your site. Extend your entries and pages with drop-down lists, radio buttons, or just plain text fields. Add additional fields to your author's profiles, giving you more information about the contributors on your site. And you can even tweak the fields used to describe your system's folders and categories, storing any details you want to keep track of. Plus, field customization even extends to letting you easily rearrange the fields in any posting form through drag-and-drop, so you can make sure authors have the easiest experience possible.

Thank You

We've been thrilled by the incredible amount of support and attention that the community's given to MT, especially during the MT 4.1 beta. The hard work has paid off -- the launch of MT 4.1 also marks the first official stable release of Movable Type Open Source. But most of all, as we said with the launch of the MT4.1 Beta, it's just getting started. After more than six years, it's exciting to see that Movable Type is still helping you do amazing things by putting the power of personal expression into the hands of an amazing community

Today we are releasing a mandatory security update for all Movable Type users, to address a potential security issue which has been reported by a third party. A detailed description of the vulnerability can be found later in this post, but to summarize: In affected versions of Movable Type, there are certain circumstances in which a blog template may be rendered dynamically via CGI in an otherwise static publishing context. If you use Movable Type to publish PHP files (or JSP or ASP pages) and have embedded within your Movable Type templates sensitive information (such as database connection information), then that sensitive information could potentially be exposed and viewed publicly.

There is no record of a customer having been affected by this vulnerability. Here's the Update Advisor, a simple scorecard to let you evaluate this new release.

Movable Type Update Advisor: Version 4.01a and 3.36

• Release Type: Security Release. The potential vulnerability has not yet been exploited in the wild.
• Mandatory? This is a mandatory update for all users of Movable Type.
• Performance Implications: None.
• Plugins Affected: None.
• Templates Affected: No changes in your templates are required.
• System Requirements: This release has no new or additional system requirements.
  
• Licensing considerations: None. MT 4.01a and MT 3.36 are free updates for users of any version of MT 4 or 3.3.
• Upgrade Fatigue: No planned updates are scheduled until the release of MT4.1, which is currently in beta. There will be no further releases before MT 4.1 unless significant security issues are found which require a 4.0x release. It has been 116 days since the last recommended update to MT4 and 273 days since the last recommended update to MT3.

In addition to the updates to Movable Type 4.01a for MT4 users and Movable Type 3.36 for MT3 users, we have issued updates to Movable Type Enterprise and to the Movable Type Community Solution and Enterprise Solution. If you are on one of these platforms, you should be contacted by your account representative about these updates shortly.

We also recognize that many Movable Type users are still running version 3.2. If you are running version 3.2, you can download a Comments.pm. Please note that this patch is only intended for use with Movable Type version 3.2.

While we routinely perform security evaluations and do regular testing of Movable Type, and strive to make Movable Type as secure and reliable as possible, we sometimes have to release these updates in order to address issues found outside the course of our scheduled testing and release process. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience of having to update your software.

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.

Learning Movable Type isn’t just today’s Movable Type Featured blog, it’s a cornerstone of our community and one of the best resources that exists for, well, learning Movable Type.

Elise Bauer has been maintaining the site for years as an indispensable reference for all of us who spend our days working and playing with the platform. Along with her collaborators Jesse Gardner and Arvind Satyanarayan (whom you might remember from our post a couple of weeks ago), Elise has been posting tutorials and how-tos that explain even the most technical concepts in perfectly understandable plain English.

But what’s really exciting is what the team’s done now: They haven’t just redesigned the site, they’ve reimagined it, as a truly community-driven effort. Everyone in the community who has something to share is welcome to publish their articles on the site and become a contributor. Most fittingly, Learning Movable Type shows off what Movable Type itself can really do: check out the smart organization of the site, grouped by topic (categories) or by subject (tags) or by contributor (authors). And new technology features like a community search make it easy to find the best Movable Type resources, regardless of where they are on the web.

We’re really excited to see the renewed level of energy around the Movable Type community these days, so it’s most appropriate that one of the flagship resources for the community has been reborn. But don’t take our word for it — go check out the all-new Learning Movable Type, maybe even contribute an article of your own, and see exactly what makes the site so special.

Back in January, we praised Time for really embracing blogs as a key part of their redesigned website. The new collection of blogs are all hosted on TypePad Business Class or powered by Movable Type, and there’s also a great new blog that covers all the areas that are in Time’s domain, called The Ag.

Great sites like this don’t just happen — they come into being with the help of members of Six Apart’s Professional Network. In this case, Time turned to the expertise of a longtime Movable Type stalwart, Chad Everett of Everitz Consulting.

Now that the blog’s been up and running successfully for a while, we thought we’d ask Chad some questions about how the site came into being.

6A: How did you first find out that Time was looking to redo their blogs?

EC: I’ve been working with Time since November of 2005 on a variety of projects. That came from a referral via Six Apart, to work on the redesign of Andrew Sullivan’s “Daily Dish” blog when he moved over to TypePad Business Class (and to Time). I don’t think that he’s part of Time any longer, however - it looks like he left earlier in February to move to The Atlantic - but he still uses the design that I implemented, for the most part :).

6A: And which blogs specifically did you work on for the Time team?

EC: In a variety of capacities, I’ve worked on: Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish, The Global Health Blog, The Allen Report, Real Clear Politics and of course The Ag. Though not strictly blogs, I’ve done some other work for Time, including their White House Photo of the Day site and an implementation of a new design for their various search results pages.

6A: Which platforms were they using for their blogs? Did your skills transfer between the hosted TypePad blogs and the Movable Type-powered blogs they hosted themselves?

EC: What is perhaps most interesting is that when we started, all of their blogs - of which I am aware - were on the TypePad platform. While the hosted platform offered some nice features, it didn’t allow others, so before too long, we ended up implementing Movable Type as well. Now, the pendulum has shifted, with only the “Global Health” blog still existing on TypePad (Andrew Sullivan is as well, but he is with someone else now). It’s a big change. Plus, even more blogs are on the Movable Type platform. The skills transferred easily between Movable Type and TypePad, because the templates are nearly identical - there are only a few tags that don’t transfer between the two platforms, which made moving a breeze, and Time seemed to appreciate how quickly things went. The hardest thing was getting the right web host for the new platform. Once that was in place, getting things rolled out took no time at all. In fact, we were able to mostly copy the existing templates for two blogs that we were getting ready to roll out on TypePad, and they were up and running quickly.

6A: What were the biggest surprises of working on the project?

EC: The biggest surprise was that, even though this was probably the largest project - at least in terms of marketing/impact - it was very likely the smallest in terms of how long it took us to scope it and get it out the door. All of the knowledge that we had gained to this point allowed us to get The Ag up and running very quickly. While the first project we did isn’t exactly the same, because it was more of a one-off project, it took much longer to put together. But The Ag was a much faster turnaround, and we were really able to leverage the knowledge that we had been building. So in turn it was a huge return on the knowledge we had built.

6A: Was it nice working on a site where everybody knows the company you’re working for?

EC: Though working for Time is nice, I don’t know that it ultimately matters much. I’m more like the Wizard of Oz, the guy behind the curtain, so it doesn’t really matter that much which project I’m working on at the time. The interface looks the same to me whether it’s a large multinational or a mom-and-pop, so it ultimately isn’t all that important in the end.

6A: How has being in the Six Apart Professional Network helped you with your work, if at all?

EC: Being in ProNet helps on two fronts. One is that referrals like this can make a difference. Here is a job that originally came in well over a year ago, and there is still income being generated from it, because the lead was a solid one. The other is that it provides a group of generally like-minded individuals where you can share success stories and help to foster a community of support for one another.

The great news is, Everitz Consulting isn’t just for newsmagazines that are a household name — they work with regular bloggers to help them get their sites running perfectly, too. Thanks to Chad for taking the time to talk to us, and for being part of the community for so long, including contributing many popular plugins that Movable Type bloggers use every day. Be sure to check out the Everitz Consulting to find out more about their work.

We’ve talked a bit about how remarkable the Movable Type community is, but it’s not just the work that our community does with blogs that makes them special. Take Kevin Shay — he’s a long time expert-level plugin developer, responsible for such cool stuff as BigPAPI, the innovative plugin framework which brought Greasemonkey-style UI plugins to Movable Type, which were later incorporated into the platform itself as Transformer plugins.

But Perl isn’t Kevin’s strongest language: English is. We’re happy to bring you a conversation between Jesse Thorn, host of The Sound of Young America, and the other Kevin Shay, Professional Network star, Movable Type user, and author of the recently released The End as I Know It. Kevin’s book, set in 1999, is a brilliantly observed, hysterical, and ultimately moving look at a man who’s both terrified of, and invigorated by, the pre-millennial hysteria about the Y2K bug.

Take a couple minutes and find out why, as happy as we are about the plugins Kevin’s created, we’re just as proud to have such a talented author as part of our community.

Use the player above or download the conversation and listen at your convenience.

It’s almost a habit — when we talk about people who use Movable Type, we say “the Movable Type community.” And people who don’t spend a lot of time surfing the web exploring blogs might scoff: “If everybody who uses software makes up a community, how come I never hear about the Norton Anti-Virus community?”

So it’s worth sharing just one of the many stories that makes the Movable Type community something special. Meet Arvind Satyanarayan. He’s the publisher of Movalog, the blog for all things Movable Type, and the creator of a number of the most popular Movable Type plugins in the world, including Privacy, his newest effort, and stalwarts such as Blogroll, LivePreview, EnhancedEntryEditing. Arvind’s also been a key driver behind efforts like the The Style Contest and tools like The Style Generator.

And Arvind is 17 years old, living in the United Arab Emirates.

Now here’s the thing — every tech community has its token Young Person. You can point to a standout whiz kid who does something cool with software and everybody says “aww, that’s so cute!” But this is where the Movable Type community takes that tech cliché and turns it into something really special.

Because, with the help of the rest of the community, Arvind’s been able to raise his skills to the next level. To tell the truth, when Arvind started IMing me a few years ago, I guessed he was just another kid who was maybe a Ben Trott fanboy and basically thought “That’s nice, but we’re pretty busy.” But through the diligent support of people on our team like our senior software engineer lead MT gearhead Brad Choate, Arvind’s picked up some pretty strong technical chops.

More to the point, the community outside Six Apart has been instrumental as well. Elise Bauer, the recipe maven responsible for Simply Recipes created the seminal Learning Movable Type site years ago, but many of the most popular and valuable tutorials on the site were created as a collaboration with Arvind.

All around the world

So what you see is Elise, a veteran of Silicon Valley who lives in California and maintains a massively popular blog, collaborating with a kid in the U.A.E. to educate an entire globe of bloggers about what’s possible.

It doesn’t end there. When Arvind needed an endorsement for his college applications, our Product Manager Byrne Reese led the charge. The Style Contest was an effort by many in the community, but a lot of the key collaboration happened between Arvind, Elise, and noted ProNet community member Jesse Gardner, who’s based in Pennsylvania. People all over the world have partnered with Arvind to make Movable Type do things we’d never even imagined.

And that support has helped Arvind take it to the next level. Customers for his plugins include some of the biggest companies in the world — think of some of the largest tech companies who are blogging, and you’ll probably see Arvind’s work behind the scenes. We’re also thrilled to announce that Arvind is the newest intern at Six Apart, helping with (what else!) improving our community efforts around the Movable Type plugin directory and our Professional Network.

That’s just part of the story, and of course we haven’t even gotten into dozens of examples of other work Arvind’s done, or other community members who’ve been similarly impressive and inspiring to us. But we thought one story of one Movable Type blogger going from “that kid in Dubai who IMs us in the middle of the night” to a valued member of the team shows what our community is all about.

Rebecca Blood hasn’t just been blogging longer than you, she literally wrote the book on blogging. And one of the things we try to do is share the vast wealth of knowledge that the expert members of the Movable Type community have gained in their years of blogging.

Fortunately, Rebecca’s not just doing that by writing books. Take her fantastic series of interviews of Bloggers on Blogging. From Glenn Reynolds’ work on Instapundit to Heather Armstrong’s blogging on Dooce to Jason Kottke’s venerable Kottke.org, many of the biggest names in blogging talk about what has helped their sites take off, how they use Movable Type to update their sites every day, and other insights that only come from experience.

One of the best examples is the recent interview with Bruce Schneier. His Schneier on Security blog is one of the most popular English-language blogs in the world, and as has been noted, it’s a great example of how a blog can help you build your career. As Rebecca says:

If you’re interested in using your blog to advance your professional reputation, it’s worth studying Bruce’s Blend—blogging, writing, and speaking—to guide your own efforts.

We’ll be keeping our eyes peeled for future interviews, and if you find other resources that we should be sharing with the community, just let us know.

After our post the other day about blogging with Office 2007 and Movable Type Enterprise, we got some great conversations started about what it takes to help businesses start blogs in general.

One of the most exciting was Isabel Wang’s column at Web Host Industry Review, entitled “Six Apart: We Won’t Be Happy Until Every Company Can Have a Blog” It’s true! And Isabel’s one of the smartest thinkers in the web hosting business, so she offers some really useful insights for web hosts. Smart thinking always begets intelligent conversation, as evidenced by the first comment, in which John McKown outlines the challenge nicely:

1. Most people that aren’t techies don’t see the value in blogging yet. They see it is as a fad and a bit of a waste of their time.
2. Many businesses still see blogs as a potential liability.
3. Many laypeople that I meet think that a blog is too large of a commitment for their time to keep a blog up.
4. Many people hear FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) spread by the mass media about blogs, and they assume that bloggers are people with too much time on their hands.

And those are exactly the same concerns and fears that we hear while explaining blogs to companies. Combine that with some current bloggers’ unwillingness to embrace new kinds of blogging (“Blogging from Office? That’s lame!”) and we’ve all got our work cut out for us.

I talk a little bit about that work over on the E-consultancy site. In the interview, I was asked a bit about ” Why should a small business consider devoting precious resources to a blog, rather than other web marketing tools…?” and was pretty pleased with how the answer turned out:

The best reason for a small business to create and maintain a blog is because it’s the most cost-effective method of maintaining a relationship with important audiences like customers, potential customers, partners, or employees. A blog doesn’t need to be run in place of other tools - it can easily complement them. For example, many companies post the content from their email newsletters on their blogs, making the most of the content while also allowing for a level of interactivity and discoverability that email alone doesn’t provide.

We’re excited that such a great conversation has started around what it’s going to take to get every business blogging. What we’re clear about so far is that we need to tell more stories of success, and spend less time hyping scare stories or worrying about whether people are blogging the “right” way. Let’s get ‘em all started, and then help improve those business blogs once they’re up and running.