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Movable Type 4.0 Goes Open Source, Adds 50 New Features

movabletype.org — WordPress gets all the press for open source blogging, but Movable Type, the daddy of all serious blogging apps, is open source now -- is there finally a new king of the blogging hill?

Who dugg this? Made popular Jun 5, 2007

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  • 3mpire, on 10/11/2007, -3/+37But WP only became the "king" after MT decided that they were going to get paid. So if anything WP's popularity is entirely due to MT driving their own user base into WP's willing arms.
  • thejerm, on 10/11/2007, -8/+32more like the return of the king
  • vannoy, on 10/11/2007, -6/+23You do understand that 99.9% of the time it's the fault of the hosting service and not WordPress itself that causes that right?
  • LegendOfLink, on 10/11/2007, -7/+24Maybe more like a Duke or Lord.

    Wordpress was open source from day one. What did it take Six Apart, 6 years and 4 versions?

    Not only that, but MT will need some time to develop the value that the WP community brings to the real King.
  • Unavoidable, on 10/11/2007, -2/+15Too bad in the time MT decided to get paid, WP has built up a sizable user-base advantage, with all that extra user generated content... MT's got a huge uphill battle now.
  • Ashex, on 10/11/2007, -0/+12@vannoy

    that's partially true. The mysql service crashes due to the massive amount of queries it gets when a page is dugg. by default, when you load a wordpress page, it queries the database to generate that page.
  • inactive, on 10/11/2007, -2/+13They're building an open source version and a closed source version (the definitive version). No thanks, I don't need that kind of business in a CMS, I have Wordpress/Drupal/Joomla and they're completely FLOSS.
  • 3mpire, on 10/11/2007, -2/+13it's kind of an implicit admission that their decision to charge a licensing fee for their application was a mistake, isn't it?
  • timdorr, on 10/11/2007, -0/+9What's funny is he suggests moving to LiveJournal, which is now owned by SixApart, makers of MT :)
  • factoryjoe, on 10/11/2007, -0/+9Here's a useful review of what's in this release: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/movable_type_40.php
  • blueeyedmonster, on 10/11/2007, -2/+11Many of you clearly have never looked into MT. The personal license for MT has been free for at least the last 8 months (and frankly for as long as I can remember, and I've been designing MT sites for ages), see here: http://www.movabletype.com/pricing.html

    They charge for businesses and for support, and the cost for that is pretty minimal for what it does.
  • kupa, on 10/11/2007, -1/+10WP (powered) Stuff gets dugg often, does it not? I'd say its a combo of poor hosts + idiot bloggers. If you are gonna add a "digg this" button, you better be damned sure you've got a good cache system setup.
  • picaman, on 10/11/2007, -0/+8Personally, I miss the days of Greymatter.
  • mdmadph, on 10/11/2007, -1/+8Uh... since when the hell was Movable Type ever _not_ open source?

    It hasn't always been free, no, but "free" and "open source" definitely don't mean the same things.
  • joshua5, on 10/11/2007, -1/+7someone call James A C Joyce
    http://www.kuro5hin.org/print/2004/2/2/171117/8823

  • Trendecide, on 10/11/2007, -2/+7By reading what's there, despite the open source release they plan to continue to charge for the application (read "how much will it cost to upgrade to MT4?"). WP will forever remain king so long as MT even attempts to charge for their software. MT could add 1000+ new features and I don't think it'd make a bit of difference, particularly while they continue to charge for their software. WP has such a strong following I'm not sure MT has a shot at this point anyhow.

    Ah well... don't use either anyhow. :P
  • aboyd, on 10/11/2007, -0/+5@rickmb,

    I don't quite agree. MySQL has both licenses. ActiveState (the Windows Perl company) does similar. Many other products are dual-licensed. I think many good products can succeed this way. However, I'm not so sure about this particular implementation. Will they go the RealPlayer route, and bury the open-source version under 100 pages admonishing the user to buy the product? Or will they openly & honestly deliver a product that people can rally around and easily download? Time will tell.
  • themoose, on 10/11/2007, -2/+7Anybody got a demo up?
  • user777, on 10/11/2007, -0/+5the sum of the matter is, all the WP people are poor, hence poor hosting service, free publishing system. j/k
  • mjsteinbaugh, on 10/11/2007, -0/+5WordPress can survive Digg's traffic when WP-Cache is enabled on a decent web host.
  • Nightfall, on 10/11/2007, -1/+5Return of the King? I am not so sure about that. I have used both MT and Wordpress, and I really can't say that one is so much better than the other. I am currently using Wordpress and I really like it. Of course, MT did the job for me as well. I never had a system crash or problem with either one. I would have to put them both on equal footing with benefits and drawbacks to each one. One is not king over the other.
  • Noctem, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4hahaha, classic. I remember this from when k5 was still relevant.
  • joaob, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4Since when has Free = OpenSource?

    I don't see anyone challenging that it has been free.

    I clearly read the title that says "Movable Type 4.0" Goes Open Source
  • spyrochaete, on 10/11/2007, -2/+6Sorry to hijack the comment, but...

    "If you are gonna add a 'digg this' button"

    Don't you just hate those? What kind of egotistical ***** deems every single blog entry worthy of being dugg?
  • plasticmind, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4Just a quick clarification... Six Apart isn't charging for MT, they're actually just charging for the "Enterprise Pack" which is MT plus some heavy duty Enterprise components like LDAP, Oracle support, granular group controls for workflow, etc. MT Vanilla doesn't cost a thing.
  • aboyd, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3@Egoist,

    That's not the experience I've had with it. I deployed MT as the CMS for http://www.agitar.com/ -- a corporate site for a unit-testing product. It has held up well, even when we do a big push in the press or a marketing campaign. It has a nice GUI for non-developers to use on the backend, sensible organization, etc. I put it in place almost 4 years ago, and the server is only rebooted during scheduled maintenance. It often goes months without a reboot.
  • h2d2, on 10/11/2007, -5/+8Let's dispell some myths here:

    1. Movabletype has always been FREE. Multi-authors and expedited technical support costs money.

    2. You can get a multi-author license and support for FREE by joining their Professional Developers mailing list.

    3. Movabletype has always been a more feature-rich, stable and secure web-app than WP.

    4. There's still a lot of people (like myself) who were their in the time before time, when there was no WP and have always used Movabletype. I have tired different versions of WP over the years but never felt compelled to move.
  • readme, on 10/11/2007, -3/+6I dumped MT for Wordpress and never looked back. MT is a mess. You can open source that code all you want, that does not make it any more useful or any less spaghetti. It's a horrible Perl/PHP hybrid that's bloated, slow, and hopelessly outdated. The publishing process is painful with rebuilding pages and becomes more and more painful as your blog grows. The dynamic rebuild process is incompatible with countless plugins. The plugin interface itself is deeply flawed in that most plugins require modifications to shared libraries and/or MovableType core files. To top it all off it's a spam magnet.

    I really hate to slam on MT so bad be really, they deserved to have the carpet pulled out from under them by Wordpress.
  • rtfx, on 10/11/2007, -1/+4I haven't looked at the code, but I wasn't impressed with Wordpress simply because it gets successfully targeted for vandalism. After getting my blog database corrupted because I was a few days slow to update(my fault, but it's not a very important or long-lived blog) I decided to look for something that seemed solid but unpopular and went to Pivot. It doesn't need SQL. It's only had two vulnerabilities in ~5 years. The theme is easy to customize with some HTML/CSS knowledge, and the default features are more than sufficient for me, so I DON'T have to deal with any plugin system or hack up the code to get it where I want.
  • ucg1, on 10/11/2007, -1/+4Wordpress was crap when I looked at it for my site. There were showstopper bugs that weren't fixed for months after they had been reported. I wasn't impressed. I went with Drupal instead, and though it could use some help in the interface department, it is very solid.
  • Egoist, on 10/11/2007, -1/+4I'm surprised at the WordPress following here. If you've ever had to delve into the codebase, I don't think any of you would be so chipper about it.

    Textpattern is a well-written, stable blog platform that can withstand a Digg swarm. On the other hand, I'm looking forward to trying out MT and curious to see how well it works.
  • stephdau, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3Haven't seen a Perl offering in a while for this breed of apps. Probably cleaner than slashcode too. ;)
  • Egoist, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3Yeah, after reading the comments at factoryjoe's link, it doesn't sound like a real winner. For instance:

    "The last time I used MT I used it on lightpd with FastCGI enabled. It seemed to grab memory at a fairly consistent rate and never give it back. To keep within bounds, I had to use a cheap-and-dirty script to restart lighttpd every so often."

    That's unacceptable in any serious web application.
  • Hashim, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2MT is releasing it as open source because there's no money in the consumer market. So why spend all your energy building a product that will make less than Typepad and Vox? instead they are making the smart move of selling enterprise services.
  • user777, on 10/11/2007, -2/+4Just when I finished installing my entire website with thousands of entries on MT with all the plugins and dynamic publishing, they decided to make everything new again. Sighs....

    I hope they have the dynamic publishing right 'cause they way it is right now, all the cool plugins broke as soon as you go dynamic.

    I'm glad WP is pushing MT on this one, as WP has done everything right, except for the user interface, which is the reason i'm using MT.

    If you want to make a profit without going open-source, u better have a kick ass development team with little market competition, otherwise, u'll lose in no time.
  • hifiDesign, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2See Blueeyedmonster's comment a few threads above. Not only does MT work, it works pretty damn well when you know what you're doing (and I'm only halfway there and didn't have that much trouble). It's been free without support for *I think* the past two years at least. I'm backing up my current install and I'll let you guys know if it floats. I was about to switch to Expression Engine but if this update is significant enough (and doesn't break a whole lot), I'll be staying in the MT camp.
  • Cl1mh4224rd, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2> "I never had a system crash. . .with either one."

    Holy Christ, I would hope not... Both being programmed in an interpreted language, that would take some serious effort.
  • Nocturnal, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2I think that's only for "business class" users. It says personal license is free. I could be wrong though.
  • inlove, on 10/11/2007, -1/+3WP has a dedicated community of thousands of developers who contribute plugins and blog templates free of charge. There is no feature that can be imagined but can not be added to WP with the help of those addons. This, and WP is in constant development (look at the recent updates hitting Digg front page) and is making major leaps with every new release.

    MT, I am afraid, is going to have a REAL hard time catching up to WP.
  • aboyd, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2I would note that since the 4.0 product will be GPL, it will be available for free not only for personal use, but lots more. Commercial use, government use, educational institutions, all will be allowed so long as you follow the GPL.
  • Squidly, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2I'm a longtime MT user, and other than comment/trackback spam, the only complaint I've had is the slow rebuild times.

    Sooooo sloooowwww. Please don't make me rebuild everything. PLEASE. :(

    The first time you make a change to a template in WP and see it instantly switch... ah man you wish it
    could be like that in MT.
  • aboyd, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2@rpgmaker,

    He prefaces his comment with "FOR ME AT LEAST" -- as in, his personal feelings. Are you honestly trying to say that he personally doesn't like Movable Type as much as he claims? Or are you just having a bad reading comprehension day?
  • user777, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2they better have it free for personal use, otherwise ... that ain't gonna cut it. i envy those WP users, always seem so happy with themselves. wonder what's on the other side of the woods?
  • blueeyedmonster, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1When I commented on this thread there had been several comments before mine saying this sort of thing:

    "By reading what's there, despite the open source release they plan to continue to charge for the application (read "how much will it cost to upgrade to MT4?")."

    "it's kind of an implicit admission that their decision to charge a licensing fee for their application was a mistake, isn't it?"
  • trenchcoat, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2Just my personal opinion but I like it better than WP. It feels more stable to me but I'm just a blogger. I know very little about code.
  • generalloy, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1rickmb, if the product is GPL that's an excellent thing. Since there are people who don't want to license things under the GPL, a dual licensed product can make money for the company providing the GPL'd product, which helps out the community and the company. Trolltech does this with QT, for example, and the other reply noted other examples.

    Mozilla is also trilicensed...GPL, LGPL, MPL.
  • spyrochaete, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2Wordpress had a couple of CSS bugs but I believe they've been fixed.
  • darkhero, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Yea it is easy. I am writing a digg mod for it right now.
  • sdenike, on 10/11/2007, -4/+5MT is horrible, WP is by far better.
  • arvind2111, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1"The plugin interface itself is deeply flawed in that most plugins require modifications to shared libraries and/or MovableType core files."

    This is categorically false. I have created a number of plugins for Movable Type (some could be considered applications in their own right) and have not yet needed to make a modification to either a shared code library or one of Movable Type's core files. In fact, the latest version of MT leap frogs any competition - especially Wordpress - in terms of the API hooks it offers for plugin authors with things such as extensible tagging, rating and archiving frameworks, a registry (which unlike its Windows' counterpart is a thing of beauty) and backend templates powered by the same templating language as its frontend, meaning any plugins you install can be used directly within the application. I've written about this in more detail here: http://www.movalog.com/archives/mt-news/athena_developers_perspective
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