Moveable Type Goes Open Source
SixApart have finally released a new beta of their blogging and content management system Movable Type. MT 4.0 is the first major release of the software since 2004 - and comes with the interesting news that SixApart will be moving the application to a GPL open-source licence before the end of this year.
Ironically enough, up until the release of MT 3.0 many users treated the software as open-source - despite the fact that it wasn’t official. When SixApart decided to enforce the licence with the release of MT 3.0 it caused widespread outrage, and this may have been one of the things that took WordPress from obscurity to popularity.
The new version of Movable Type is radically different from previous versions though, with more than 50 new features - including an installation and upgrade wizard, more powerful templating, new bundled themes, and a redesigned user interface. It also integrates social media by offering simple ways to get photos, videos and audio into posts - and there’s a new ratings framework too. Scalability concerns have also been squashed with database caching - increasing the chances of surviving the Digg effect unscathed.
My Personal Experience
I download the new beta yesterday - but gave up after two hours of failing to get my new blog to display! I had to manually change CGI permissions in the root directory, set up the required MySQL database, and figure out where Sendmail was located on my server - before I could even get into the Control Panel!
The admin stuff does looks great though - with an excellent Dashboard and drop-down menu navigation. Given how much has obviously been ‘borrowed’ from WordPress though, it’s a shame it doesn’t even come close in terms of intuitiveness! It took me ages to figure out how to do anything - which might not be a problem if you’re totally green to blogging!
I’m not stupid when it comes to the Internet; I develop in PHP myself, and I’ve been using pre-written scripts and database applications for at least 8 years. I also followed the Getting Started Guide to the letter - so it’s not like I’d done something wrong! Perhaps WordPress has just made me lazy, with it all being so simple…
Special technical note: please DO NOT install MT on to the same domain as your WP blog (even if it’s in a sub-directory). It puts an index.html file into the root of the domain, which typically takes precedence over the default index.php required for WordPress. What you end up with is the MT blog coming up instead of the WP one, if you view it from the root of your domain (i.e. http://paulenderson.com). Feel free to comment if you need more on this, or if you’ve screwed up your blog like I did! 
Conclusion?
Moveable Type 4.0 is definitely a step in the right direction - and it’s heart-warming to see SixApart taking the GPL route. But they’re not going to suceed in drawing people away from WordPress until they’ve seriously improved their backend. Perhaps I’ll give it another go once it’s out of beta though…
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I was one who moved away from MT when they announced their new fee structure.. and I fully believe that is a large part of what launched WordPress out of its shell and into mass popularity…make no mistake, WordPress would have achieved that anyways . . however, the MT licensing was the boost WP needed. Right place, right time.
I still develop MT sites for some of my clients - - not very many. I would say 95% of our client base are WP users..about 3% Typepad and 2% use MT (if we aren’t successful in talking them into the wonderful world of WP, that is).
Honestly - I hate developing sites for MT, to the point that I raised my pricing structure for MT sites. So, yea - the same blog design you purchase for MT will cost you more than if you ordered a design for WP… and that is because of all the hassle and extra time involved in creating an MT site design.
As a matter of fact, I am working on an MT site right now for a client — and was working on it yesterday and thinking to myself… “MT is SO 1990’s”.. that’s when I saw that beta4 announcement (along with the GPL) and then said to myself… they really missed the boat and are sprinting to catch up.
Sounds like you had an MT4 nightmare over there - - I think I’ll hold off
Thanks for your input! I tried converting a Joomla layout to MT3 about a year ago, and it proved such a painful process that I ended up working it with WP instead. Having said that (and from what I’ve seen first-hand) the templating engine has got a swift kick up the bottom - and is now certainly inline with the WP method.
Is it a case of “too little, too late” for MT? I really hope not - WP (bless their little cotton socks) has managed to totally dominate the blogging scene for a while now, and I think it can only be of benefit to everybody if they had a little competition!
I’ll let you know if I have more luck once it’s out of beta!
I don’t think it’s a case of ‘too little, too late’, no. SixApart moving to open source is welcome, for sure - - they do, however, have TONS of ground to cover.
That is good to hear that their templating engine got a makeover - there is hope!
[…] you have to wonder, as do quite a few other folks around the Net, why open source and why now? As Carthik pointed out, the […]
I already had problems upgrading to 3.34, some of the plugins I was using didn’t work with this version. It took me a while to find replacements, some plugins were simply not upgraded/developed. So I wonder what this version would be like. It’s funny, every time I have it all working smoothly they come up with another beta. I think I will wait a while before swapping to 4.0 until all the bugs are gone
All blogging platforms seems liable to the same ‘upgrade causes plugin problems’ nightmare! The MT4 upgrader is supposed to solve all the issues, but I wouldn’t bank on it - given the amount of hassle I had with a *fresh* install!
If I was forced to choose between WP2.2 and MT4, then I’d pick WP without hesitation. I’m hoping though that the MT team (suddenly much bigger with the open source gearshift) will get MT4 out of beta, and then quickly get to work on MT5!
If MT works *really* hard I can potentially see them stealing WP’s thunder in 8-12 months… If anybody from MT reads this, then I am (naturally) available for consultation work!
Hah, feel the pain on the test install front. I tried making it live in a subdirectory and there was just no clear path forward without alot of screwing around (.htaccess / whatever). Though, I never wound up having it eat my site via a stray index.html, think I got lucky on that one.
Re,
Tomo.
Thanks for dropping by Tomo! I really hope that it gets better by the time they release it!
I’d imagine that it will probably be something that doesn’t matter all that much long term. Once the community and documentation get up there it will be a trivial footnote somewhere as to how to get it running in a multi-CMS root. Meanwhile we crazy early adopters occasionally grumble.
Seems like sixapart are one of the few companies that actually means “beta” when they say it these days too! Might trip people up a little. The plugin / upgrade issue seems to be a permanent poison pill for any cms as well - noticed even with the 2.3 alpha of wordpress there’s been a table redesign that will probably break some stuff initially.
It’s a funny thing, if you really want to be early adopter on anything you should know the guts of it inside out (sql / php knowledge kills most upgrade pains, table conversions etc) but beta is such a popular concept that there’s no fear of it anymore. I’m guilty of the exactly thing, I run Joomla nightly builds in some places (not public ones), but if it blows up at this stage I’d have little clue how to do the required brain surgery. Just be another grumpy “your pre alpha product died omg hate you!” user on a forum somewhere. heh
Thanks for your comment Tomo!
I think it’s far more exciting to be a grumbling early adopter than a contended general user!
I’ve only had one plugin break during a WP upgrade - and that was probably down to my theme, as opposed to WordPress breaking it! I know at least one person who ran MT2, and they had to remove almost all of their plugins when they moved to MT3 - so I don’t think we WP users can complain too much!
I run the Joomla SVN releases on one of my dev sites, but I think I’ve got to a stage with it (having run Mambo originally since the first beta release) where I know what’s under the hood - so I can usually fix anything that breaks!
It is always exciting to see undocumented features as the evolve in SVN builds. Never had a major break with WP upgrades, though the 2.3 stuff still occasionally references some of the defunct 2cat tables here and there. No show stoppers to date though.
Had alot of fun with Joomla, though didn’t know the architecture / PHP well enough to dig my way out of corners when running SVN builds. Going to cut my teeth on Wordpress for the time being and come back to the big J! when my code is better.
Be interesting to see how things play out for Joomla with the whole GPL thing coming up in the last few days. Between that and MT / Habari / Ruby there seems to be alot of movement in the CMS world lately.
Yup, the whole CMS market seems to be attracting a lot of attention lately! I think it’s only natural though - following the current trend for self-publication.
It’s good to see so many applications moving to full GPL support too: Joomla and MoveableType are wise to see the long-term benefits of the move!
Thanks for your comments Tomo - and best of luck with your blog restart!
If they hope to attract new users (and certianly if they wish to entice users away from WP), then they’ve got to make the install fool-proof. I think part of WP’s success is down to its ease of installation. For something as large and complex as WP, they done a fantastic job of ensuring that just about anyone can get in up-and-running within minutes.
Like you, I code in PHP, and have done so for years, but that doesn’t make me any more patient.
It might help their case if they build an installer for Fantastico - which comes with almost all PHP hosting packages these days.
It currently takes me 20 seconds to setup a brand-new WP site on a sub-domain, because Fantastico makes it stupidly simple!