Everyone’s favorite greyhound — by which I mean my favorite, naturally — has left the gates and is now riding a unicorn to victory, because by the glory of Thor, Movable Type 4.0 is finally out of beta. This means that now, Movable Type’s source code is open-source — which is great for plugin developers (Movable Type will finally have the potential for a large user-base like WordPress) — and to celebrate, not only is there a new admin panel, but Movable Type now has a shiny new homepage. I like how it’s far easier to download Movable Type now, instead of having to go through Six Apart and trying to find the one version you wanted. Now, the default is a free plan; this should help to ease some new users’ fears!

Movable Type’s documentation is now more organized and structured. It’s far than before, I feel, although I wish that documentation still existed for older versions of Movable Type (some can be found on Six Apart’s site). The template tag reference is now sorted alphabetically — while this makes tags easier to look up, it wouldn’t help someone understand exactly how tags are related (the old categorized template tags did that well).

Setup

The download files are 4.1-4.9 MB in size, compared with only about 1 MB for a WordPress download, but Movable Type hasn’t exactly professed to being lightweight. I’m worried that most of the extra weight is dealing with the new cosmetic changes, but since I don’t have a copy of Movable Type 3.35 anymore, I can’t really check the file-size against that.

Installation was a breeze, since Movable Type has an installation wizard now (thank god). I set up a database, typed in some details, user names and the like, and it took about a minute to install, and when you think about it, a one-minute installation really isn’t bad. There’s some silliness about notification e-mails that you can actually skip — I’m sure you can set that up within Movable Type itself.

Usage

There are some new things in 4.0 that I thought were worth mentioning:

• Rebuilds are no longer necessary! They’ve been replaced by this “Publish” function, which looks to be entirely optional.
• “Dashboard” — blog stats and widgetified goodness (but lots of validation errors because of scripties)
• Ability to create folders and pages, essentially allowing Movable Type to manipulate/create an entire site.
• File uploading (makes installing plugins way easier)
• Ability to change rel=”nofollow” from Settings instead of through the code.
• “Assets” — image, audio, and video files can be separately stored
• Code-highlighting when editing templates (very nice touch!)
• Dropdown menu with insertable template tags
• Lovely new themes, inspired by Vox’s basic themes.
• “Address Book” — for keeping track of contacts (like a blogroll for e-mail addresses?)

There are also, unfortunately, some annoyances that ride on the coat-tails of Movable Type’s shiny new system.

• Users can only be added from the System Overview section. There also seem to be too many users (or am I just being silly?): Author, Blog Administrator, Commenter, Contributor, Designer, Editor, Moderator, and Webmaster. I guess it’s just one of those things that comes with setting up your system for a community, not necessarily individuals.
• There’s still no simple way to install plugins.
• Although the “Upload Files” section can upload to any folder you need it to, I’m sure there will be confusion on whether or not you can upload “Assets” through that section (the answer is, yes you can. Just direct the uploader to /assets/)

In addition to these, some things have changed with regards to posting entries. Markdown and SmartyPants, my two favorite formatting plugins, are now built-in; Textile formatting is also included. Normally, the text-area for “Extended Entry” is below the “Entry Body” text-area, which appeals to me structurally. After all, the extended entry is after the body. It just makes sense. Now, however, “Extended Entry” is a tab, which would only confuse me the first few times I wrote a long entry (i.e., every time I write).

Also, while the old interface is arguably simpler, this one is trying to put more emphasis on eye candy. It ends up creating a little bit of lag and, rather unfortunately, several validation errors. It’s because of this that I don’t plan on switching to Movable Type 4 right away. I’m not entirely enamored by it. Certain things have definitely improved (templating, for example), but there’s a loveliness to the old administration panel that I’m just reluctant to give up so quickly.

Regardless of any qualms I have with 4.0, I’m excited about Movable Type being open source. To think that I can finally make plugins I need in a language I sort of understand! Either way, the documentation is great, so I’ll look into it a bit more. Today is a proud day for the entire nation of Lithuania, henceforth the Movable Type capital of the world.

My Movable Type 4.0 installation is really just a demo account. If you’d like to play around with 4.0, let me know, and I’ll hook you up with some login details. Bonzai!

Read 2 comments (Leave a comment?)

Aaron T. said:

I’m glad that it finally went open source. They lost a lot of users back in the day to WP (which I still can’t bring myself to use).

MT/TXP/EXP are all designer’s CMSs (even though, now, MT is gearing also to another demographic), designed to make it easier for people with a knowledge of HTML/XHTML/CSS. WP is still, and possibly will forever be, a user’s CMS, primarily for making it easy to get blogging right out of the box.

Both have their advantages and disadvantages, but it’s still the “designer’s” CMS for me :).

Posted on August 16, 2007 5:44 PM; Permalink

Ranjani said:

Aaron: I’ve only really used WP on my school’s Latin Club site so far, because about fifteen people besides me are going to be using that site and WP’s probably the easiest for them to use.

Unfortunately, WP’s always been really hard for me to design with because it doesn’t exclusively use tags — there’s still a lot of PHP mingled into it, which is great for people who know the language, but not for me.

I actually initially had a footnote about WP’s users vs. say, Movable Type’s users. I took it out because I was lazy :(

I love all three “designers” (very true!) blogging platforms that you mentioned. I guess that’s just a preference of mine :P

Posted on August 16, 2007 11:12 PM; Permalink