We want to let you all know that Movable Type 4.26 is now available.  This is an optional performance release which includes bug fixes and feature improvements.

Movable Type 4.26 is recommended for Movable Type Enterprise 4.x customers because it provides dramatically better search performance for large datasets and improves background publishing performance and reliability (i.e. TheSchwartz).  You can review the release notes on movabletype.org for full details on all changes.  We recommend only updating to 4.26 if the documented changes will directly impact you.

Movable Type Update Advisor: Version 4.26

• Release Type: Performance Release. This update fixes bugs and improves existing features.  No new features are included.
• Mandatory? No.  This is an optional upgrade recommended for Movable Type Enterprise users.
• Performance Implications: Better search performance for large datasets and improved reliability and performance around TheSchwartz.
• Plugins Affected: None. Current plugins should continue to work as expected.
• Templates Affected: None.
• System Requirements: This release has no new or additional system requirements.
• Licensing considerations: None. Movable Type 4.26 is a free update for users of any version of MT 4.x.
• Upgrade Fatigue: No further mandatory updates are planned for 2009.  Optional releases may become available.

Downloads are available in your account for current customers or through the download page.

Today, we're launching a new application for Movable Type Pro, called Motion. If you're just looking for the headline to put on your blog, you can think of it this way:

• Microblogging like Pownce or Tumblr or Twitter plus
• Activity streams like FriendFeed or Plaxo Pulse plus
• Really easy OpenID sign in support for commenters, including both Google Accounts and Facebook Connect

And Motion is free with your license for Movable Type Pro. (MT Pro is free for bloggers, and very affordable for businesses.)

That's the short version. But the vision of Motion is something we've been working on for a long time, well before we acquired Pownce or before the tech blogosphere started talking about Google Friend Connect vs. Facebook Connect. So, we'd like to outline some of the guiding principles that informed our creation of Motion, as a starting point to the conversation about where social applications in general are headed.

The biggest social network is the Internet itself.

Outside of the tech geek bubble, regular people wonder if they should choose Facebook or MySpace to promote their companies, or if they should use Flickr or SmugMug to share their photos. The way people talk about these services, average users think they have to choose between different services when they want to connect with other people on the web. We think that's broken, like choosing between NBC and ABC and CBS. Why not pick and choose the best of each different network?

Open standards will win; Old timers will remember when we could only email other people using the same service, like AOL or CompuServe. Then open standards for email came along, and suddenly we could email anybody we wanted to.

We have had to choose between social networks because there weren't open standards to connect them. So at Six Apart, we invented OpenID and Action Streams. Motion's core abilities are built around these open standards.

Today’s mainstream social networks are like yesterday’s mainstream media.

We have huge respect for the giant social networks like Facebook and MySpace and even the platforms of Google and Yahoo! and AOL. That's why we're proud to call them partners. But we've learned from working with the biggest mainstream media companies in the world that the best thing for the medium is if independent bloggers and publishers are around to collaborate, curate and, yes, compete with the giant networks.

Just as thousands of independent publishers have sprung up to complement the mainstream media networks, thousands of independent social networks will spring up to complement mainstream social networks. Motion lets you run your own network on your own site under your own control, granting you independence in the same way that blogging gave us a measure of independence from traditional media.

Reveal the community you already have.

No matter how small your brand is, or how unique your hobby is, there's a community for it on the web. But right now, it's spread out across dozens of different websites. Maybe some people who share your passion are sharing links about it on Delicious, and others are posting photos about it on Flickr.

Every tag can be a community. We've built Motion to let you aggregate actions from your choice of dozens of supported social networking and sharing services.

Your social network belongs under your control.

Motion is built on Movable Type, which means you run it on your own web server, under your own control. We provide professional support for the platform, and many partners are lining up to provide services like design and development and deployment for your Motion site. But ultimately, by running your social network on your own site, you keep ownership of your data and you can control the branding and presentation of your community. If you're a publisher, you can even have your own advertising on your Motion site, and our Six Apart Media team can help you make money with your community.

Your community should start with half a billion members.

It's not enough to drive people to your community. One of the biggest obstacles to participating in a social networking site can be getting users to register. In Motion, anyone can sign in to comment or vote on a post using their existing OpenID login or account from Google, Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and many more providers.

Membership still has its privileges: Full rights to post with the slick new microblogging interface are reserved for registered members of your Motion site. We think this strikes a nice balance between letting anyone on the web participate in your site while providing a compelling benefit to motivate people to sign up.

There are lots of other applications out there with great features for building a social network. But with those tools, you're starting from scratch with an empty community with no members and no content, trying to turn a ghost town into a metropolis.

With Motion, Action Streams make sure your new community is pre-populated with content, and OpenID makes sure nobody has to fill out a registration form just to vote for an item that they like.

The web is in Motion.

Finally, Motion is an effort that's designed to incorporate our partners and peers around the web. We've provided documentation so that anybody who runs a web service or social networking site can make sure there's an Action Stream to get connected to Motion. And we'll be launching with the support of a broad range of partners offering their services to anyone who wants to get started with Motion.

There is a lot more to come, but you can get started by checking out the Motion page, or by signing up for a free demo.

This is the vision we've laid out for Motion, but it's obviously a new idea and significantly different from what the has come before: Did we get it right? Let us know what you think.

Today we announce the release of Movable Type 4.23. This mandatory security release is recommended for all users (see update advisor below), and fixes a number of bugs in 4.21. Review the change log for full details on all changes in this new version.

Movable Type Update Advisor: Version 4.23

• Release Type: Security Release. This update fixes a potential vulnerability which has not yet been exploited in the wild.
• Mandatory? Yes, this is a mandatory security upgrade.
• Performance Implications: None.
• Plugins Affected: None. Your current plugins should continue to work as expected.
• Templates Affected: An update to the profile view template is required for those customers who use the community template sets and user profile feature. 
• System Requirements: This release has no new or additional system requirements.
• Licensing considerations: None. MT 4.23 is a free update for users of any version of MT 4.x.
• Upgrade Fatigue: No further mandatory updates are planned for Movable Type in 2008.

Downloads are available in your account for current customers or through the download page.

[Editor's Note: There was no Movable Type 4.22. It's a long story. But you didn't miss anything, don't worry!]

Today, we're releasing the latest update to Movable Type, version 4.2, and along with it we're announcing the launch of Movable Type Pro, a profoundly powerful new set of capabilities that shows the web where blogging is going next.

So, what's new in this release?

• Movable Type Pro lets you turn any site into a full social publishing platform, combining all of Movable Type's abilities as a blogging and CMS with social networking features like profiles, ratings, user registration, forums, following, and more.
• The platform upgrade to Movable Type 4.2 fulfills the top three requests made by our community -- it's up to 100 times faster for common tasks, features much simpler templates for customizing your site, and includes 100% free and open source TypePad AntiSpam for keeping junk comments off your site.
• Movable Type Pro includes all of the features in the Movable Type Community Solution and more, giving you all the power of this enormously successful social networking platform. And if you're a personal blogger or have a current MT license, Movable Type Pro is a free update.
• Movable Type remains the most secure publishing platform of its kind. As part of developing these new versions, we completed the most intensive proactive search for security issues in the history of the platform.

First, we set publishing free. Next up, social networks.

These announcements are a milestone for the entire Movable Type community, but they represent a vision that we've been building for years. Almost seven years ago, when Movable Type was first being created, the power of publishing on the web was still largely in the hands of a few giant media companies. In the years since, thanks in no small part to the community of bloggers who got started with Movable Type, that power has been unleashed, making it possible for anyone to publish with all the professionalism and presence of a giant media corporation by using easy-to-use, open tools.

Today, we're bringing the same idea to social networking. Providing social features to your community doesn't mean you have to give up control of your community to a giant media entity. Managing a community online is something you can do yourself, using easy-to-use, open tools.

Enough theory -- here's the features in MT Pro:

• Everyone's invited. You can easily add full-featured forums, community blogs and group blogs to your site, and since Movable Type has always managed an unlimited number of blogs in one interface, you can keep track of all those conversations using a single set of tools.
• Membership. It's easy to allow anyone on the web to register on your site, or to sign in with MT's industry-leading OpenID support. Once they're in, your site's members get full-fledged customizable profiles, personalized user pictures (avatars), and can follow their friends or other site members they're interested in.
• Call it "UGC", if you must. Any member of your community can, with appropriate permissions, submit content for publishing on your site. Administrators have full ability to review submissions, and submitted posts show up on user profiles right next to their comments and other activity. Whether you call it "user-generated content" or just "a good idea", it's built right in.
• Ratings and Recommendations. Any registered user on your site can vote for content they like, making it easy to create "most popular" or "most recommended" lists on your site. You can even create your own voting communities within your site -- think "Digg in a box".

And all of those features are on top of the amazing new powers of MT 4.2:

• It's fast. MT's smart caching only publishes the parts of the page that change, and the core engine's been radically revamped to make it more efficient. The result? Using your current templates, publishing can be two to three times faster, right out of the box. Some testers have seen results with publishing up to ten times as fast or more.
• Templates are super simple. MT has always been designed so you don't need a ton of plugins to do fancy things with your site's design. But with all that power, our community told us that we also needed to make sure templates were still easy to understand. So in MT 4.2, templates are vastly simplified, and easier than ever to customize. And live template previews even let you see design changes before they're published on your site.
• 100% Free AntiSpam. TypePad AntiSpam is the best comment spam prevention service on the web. And it's 100% free no matter how many comments you get, plus it's open source and Akismet API compatible so it's easy to hook up to your site. With MT 4.2, it's also built right in to Movable Type.
• Even better APIs. OpenID suppport, OAuth libraries, and the ability to add in plugins to connect with the iPhone, Action Streams and more are all built right in. And all of your MT4 plugins should keep working just fine with this update, or have been updated to work even better in 4.2.
• Plus all the power of MT4. A powerful built-in asset management system. Integrated widget management. The smartest template editor around. The ability, as always, to manage an unlimited number of blogs and authors all in one place. Industry-leading support for new technologies and features. And an absolutely unparalleled community of passionate developers, designers, bloggers, and experts.

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.

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.

Downloads are available in your account for current customers or through the download page.

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.