While WordPress may be one of the most popular blog software platforms, Movable Type has beat it to the punch in becoming an extremely versatile blog software tool.
Movable type has long been a blogging and CMS tool and the latest release, 4.2, goes one step further and capable of turning any site into a full social publishing platform. The Movable Type blog claims :
…..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 is available as a free download and self install. There is also a Pro edition which includes blogger support (around $99 for the free version). The Pro edition is quite pricey for just under $400.
If you do a product comparison, the free version, whilst lacking support, appears to have broader appeal than the paid version. The free version has unlimited authors and community profiles whilst the paid version is limited to 20 authors and 5000 community profiles. A careful read of the product comparison table seems to indicate the only real benefit to the paid version is the blogger support, and that can be purchased separately anyway.
There are a lot of Movable Type fans around and I am sure they will welcome the latest version. Whether we need any more social outlets is debatable, otherwise the screenshots and the sites I have seen that use it as their blog software look good.
