Because CMS industry pundits are generally focused on dynamic publishing platforms such as WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal that have their individual unique features, but solve the same problems in very similar ways.

Although Movable Type competes with these systems, at its heart the architecture goes about managing and publishing content quite differently. Its core feature is static publishing, which is built around the idea that most of the content on your website is there for the long term, and is going to change very little after it's been created and published.

Was "Dynamic Publishing" Really That Revolutionary After All?

WordPress came along about 10 years ago, and advocated dynamic publishing as a revolutionary way of serving content.  This would allow for a very customized user experiences, and content would flow to different pages on the site much more quickly and smoothly than it did under static publishing.

Although dynamic publishing improved the apparent speed of the CMS backend for some users, the content display advantages that were touted early-on never really lived up to the hype. So, the biggest change that WordPress brought was that pages were displayed on the fly for each site visitor, and therefore always contained the latest content.

The only problem with this way of managing and publishing content is that pure dynamic publishing doesn't scale very well. So, the WordPress community worked hard and created-- caching plugins for WordPress-- which simulate the kind of static publishing environment that Movable Type made famous.

So if managing large numbers of site visitors with minimal resources and complexity is important to your site, why not use MT?  Then you get the scalability you want with fewer third-party components.

Why Not the Best of Both Worlds?

Let me try to be fair about the static publishing versus dynamic publishing debate: modern CMS-based websites need the best of both worlds. The question is whether any CMS available today does a better job of it than the others?

This brings us to the number one new feature of Movable Type 6.0 that has so far been undervalued by the industry: The new Movable Type Data API.

The MT Data API: Not Perl, Not PHP, But a JavaScript API

Until Movable Type 6, Movable Type has never had an easy way for programmers to access the content in its database for dynamic page generation. The Movable Type Data API addresses that issue in a fundamentally more modern way than WordPress does. The Movable Type Data API is developed by the Movable Type development team itself (it's not a plugin created by a third-party developer); It opens up MT to JavaScript programming using ultramodern tools like jQuery and jQuery Mobile.

This ought to end the sort of criticism of Movable Type that said:

1. Movable Type isn't a modern CMS because the core code is implemented in Perl (still true, but the Data API further abstracts use of the data from the core), and more importantly,
2. Any kind of complex custom development required Perl programming skill and knowledge of Perl data structures to execute. 

What could be easier for web designers in 2013 than coding websites in HTML, CSS, and especially JavaScript?

The Data API as an Alternative to Plugin Development

Now, instead of developing plugins in Perl that expose custom Movable Type Markup Language Tags, just use the Data API with jQuery to get data from Movable Type and add it to the DOM as data attributes, like you do with any other JSON data source.

What Can Be Done With the Data API?

What does this mean for you? What can you do with Movable Type 6 that it couldn't do before? Below are a few examples.

• Smartphone applications that can be placed in the Apple App Store or Google Play. They can be constructed using frameworks like PhoneGap or Sencha Touch.
• Widgets for your website that stream or list content published in Movable Type. For instance, dynamic display of comments associated with blog entries or website pages would give you a way to create scalable communities without relying on external social networks or third-party comment management solutions.
• Custom applications for news gathering, developed for any platform but especially tablets like the iPad or Android tablets.

The continued growth of Movable Type lies in expanding use of the Data API. Developers who master these programming techniques will be able to build features for Movable Type published websites faster than these same features can be built for WordPress and other competing CMS solutions.

With most publishers and brands having an ever evolving tech-savvy customer, rapid development is crucial to staying out in front of their wants and needs.

When Six Apart tasked 601am with building a new site for the Movable Type community, we first considered the implications. The Movable Type, and CMS industry, had changed considerably since the last MT.org was build. We interviewed community members, considered what new and veteran MT developers alike would need, and set out to build a site worthy of that.

What you see here is still a work in progress. Six Apart is working on two key areas of this site -- rebuilding MT's plugin directory and focusing effort on improving MT's documentation, which lives here. I am excited to see where the future takes the MT community.

In building this new site, we weren't afraid to kill what was no longer working. For example, you'll no longer see links to the old forums, which became an outdated way to communicate with others in the MT community. Instead, we've replaced it with a feature we call Ask an Expert -- a Stack Overflow-like site allowing anyone to ask a question and get a qualified response back from an actual community expert. Many thanks to Dan Wolfgang for answering the first question.

Continue to watch MT.org for more improvements and please send any feedback to me personally at aaron@601am.com.

Today, August 3rd, 2013, marks the grand opening of the brand new Movable Type Plugins and Themes Directory. The directory will initially run as a beta version alongside the beta version of Movable Type 6, with an official release date coinciding with the Movable Type 6 official release in October, 2013.

• English: http://beta.plugins.movabletype.org
• Japanese?http://beta.plugins.movabletype.jp

One of the most exciting features of the new plugins and themes directory is the ability to link to information registered on Github, which will help make publishing plugins and themes to the directory easier than ever. Simply provide the Github plugin or theme repository URL and all the necessary information will be automatically retrieved and published to the directory. Plugins and themes version information and descriptions will also automatically update whenever the Github settings file is updated.

* It will still be possible to publish plugins or themes that have not been previously registered on Github.

We hope that developers will take this opportunity to register with the new directory and share their plugins and themes with the Movable Type community. As always, we look forward to your feedback.

Please keep in mind the beta testing environment is not free of bugs and malfunctions during use may occur.

(User registration, as well as plugin and theme publication, requires administrative approval and consequently may take up to a few days to complete. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.)

The responsive web design supported themes [Rainier] and [Eiger], previously offered as part of a Movable Type 5.2 package, are now available under the MIT license.

In accordance with the MIT license, users are free to modify, redistribute and use with commercial websites.

For more information on the MIT license, please refer to the following page.

http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT

• Rainier
  • https://github.com/movabletype/mt-theme-rainier

• Eiger
  • https://github.com/movabletype/mt-theme-eiger

Recently, Six Apart announced planned licensing changes coinciding with the release of the blog and CMS software Movable Type 6. Based on feedback from our users about these upcoming changes, we wanted to address some concern regarding future support for MTOS. We hope the information below will help answer most of the questions that we received.

Will MTOS continue to receive security support?

Yes. As Movable Type 6 is scheduled for release in October, 2013, MTOS and MT 5.2x, the last version of MT to offer MTOS, will continue to receive security updates and fixes for serious issues until October 2015, in accordance with the life cycle policy.

For more information on the Movable Type life cycle policy, please see this page.

• New Movable Type product life cycle policy announced today

Will the 5.2 repository remain public on Github?

Yes. All released versions of MT can be found and accessed using the tag for their respective version number.

Reference: MT5.2.7 tagged data on Github

• https://github.com/movabletype/movabletype/tree/mt5.2.7

Thank you for your continued support.

• Dropping MTOS offering - discussed in-depth on expanded post
• MT Pro and MT Advanced - Will be under MT commercial license
• New MT6 Data API - under MIT license so that developers can extend it, build new things, and license them how they want or sell their new work.
• New Loupe web application for mobile - will be under MIT license so that developers can extend it, build new things and license them how they want or sell their new work.
• Will we re-license two recently released themes, Eiger (new responsive web design theme) and Rainier (a new blog theme), under MIT licenses allowing developers to extend or sell their new work?

Adding the MIT license to new MT extensions we believe allows our users to take full advantage of our vastly improved API designed specifically for Movable Type 6, the Data API and Chart API Javascript libraries will also be offered under the MIT License. In addition, access to and use of the Smart Phone application Loupe will also be covered under the MIT license. Different than some other CMS offerings, we believe our community should be able to build upon and enhance offerings and benefit from their work. Developers will now be able to distribute products that Included the JavaScript library, as well as Loupe modification applications and plug-ins, with more control on how your derivative code will be used.

Based on recent comments and conversations that appeared on social media, we thought it would be best to clarify our new licensing policy and explain the reasons for some our the moves being made by Six Apart. After more than 6 years of making MTOS available for free, we don't believe that MTOS, itself, added any significant value to Movable Type as a whole. In fact, since our previous owners released MTOS to try and appease an angry development community that felt betrayed when the previous owners decided to start charging for the software to fund innovation and product support, and the growth of their company, MTOS has not had the effect everyone had hoped for. Since this decision was made and MTOS was release, and with stiff competition from other open source offerings, Movable Type has had a downward trajectory in market share and sales in the US. The community has not grown because of MTOS, nor have we seen download numbers that are any greater than our paid versions of Movable Type, so at this point it does not make any economic sense to continue to maintain and distribute something that is getting very little use. We have decided to put our resources and developers behind MT Pro and Advance, to make them the best offering in the marketplace.

On the contrary, I actually believe that MTOS hurt the adoption of Movable Type in the market. Research has made it quite clear that many IT organization and development firms (outside our community) have wrongly assumed that MTOS was our full version of Movable Type. When customers are evaluating CMS offerings, they compare what they can get for free from Movable Type, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, or others. MTOS, because it's not our full feature set offering, makes us compare unfavorably with the other free open source platforms.

One could make the argument based on the above, that the answer is to make all of the software free, which would also solve the problem mentioned above, but there would be a few key business points missing. The top two free, open source CMS offerings compete for business with their community, picking the best clients and projects for themselves - we are sure everyone is familiar with Automattic and Acquia. We don't want to compete with the community, but rather, we want the community to have access to all of the biggest and best clients. All of these organizations exert some type of control to make money, whether its advertisements on free services, fees for hosting, etc. All software providers have made some type of choice that limits their community or users in some way, which is the unfortunate fact of doing business and making money.

In order to avoid confusion, the ideal thing for us to do is to put our best foot forward and put all of our resources and marketing behind our full, paid versions of Movable Type.

That said our goal is also to expand our product offering in the next twelve to eighteen months. These future products may address concerns on cost, access, etc. We really hope you understand why we are going in this direction; one could argue that that this is the path Movable Type should have taken all along.

Thank You.

Robert Minton VP/General Manager Six Apart North America

]]> tag:www.movabletype.org,2013://2.38272 2013-07-10T15:00:01Z 2014-04-04T10:34:49Z

MTOS GPL began with Movable Type 4, partly as a way to show our gratitude for the Movable Type community. One of our greatest hopes at the time was that by offering an open source version of Movable Type, it would ease the burden on developers when creating and distributing plugins and themes. The MTOS GPL increased open source distribution far more than we anticipated, and it became a popular license among Movable Type community members.

Although MTOS GPL will no longer be available, GitHub will remain open and accessible to all, regardless of Movable Type license ownership, and Movable Type staff will continue accepting and reviewing feedback submitted through GitHub. In this way, we hope to keep evolving Movable Type as an open source product.

In an effort to help our users take full advantage of the stronger API designed specifically for Movable Type 6, the Data API and Chart API Javascript libraries will be offered as the MIT License. Access to and
use of the Smart Phone application, Loupe, will also be included with this license. Developers will now be able to distribute products that include the Javascript library, as well as Loupe modification applications and plugins.

Movable Type would not have evolved into the product it is today without the continued support from our community. We hope this change will make it easier for both developers and users to personalize Movable Type into a stronger and more efficient blog and website management platform and we look forward to hearing your feedback.

For more information about the license changes coming in Movable Type 6, visit Clarifying Changes to Movable Type Starting with MT6.

Most notably, a bug was found in the 5.2.6 release that caused an error to occur if certain block tags were present within an <mt:Ignore> tag.

This release does not include security related patches.

• 5.2.7 release notes

The Movable Type 5.2.6 release offers fixes for bugs found after the release of version 5.2.3 and features 4 brand new functions. At the same time, Movable Type 5.15 also have been released.

This update also includes fixes for bugs found in Movable Type EZ versions 5.2.4 and 5.2.5.

For more information on the new functions and bug fixes, please refer to the release notes.

• 5.2.6 Release Notes
• 5.15 Release Notes

* Check out this previous blog entry for an explanation on the new release numbering system.

New Functions

New Responsive Web Design Theme "Eiger"

"Eiger" is especially suited for use with larger company websites and blogs. Along with Media Query (CSS) supported multi-device compatibility, logos, headers and banners, and navigation are all easily customizible with built-in Movable Type functions.

The "Smartphone Option"

The optional "Smartphone Option" is now available bundled together with either Movable Type Professional or Movable Type Advanced. (As of now, the "Smartphone Option" can only be obtained through a bundle purchase.)

The "Smartphone Option" offers a version of the Movable Type admin screen that has been optimized for smartphones, tablets and other portable devices.

For more information on using the "Smartphone Option", please refer to the "Smartphone Option User Manual" from "Movable Type 5 documentation".

Canonical Link Elements

Canonical elements can now be used with the MT tags "MTCanonicalURL" and "MTCanonicalLink".

Language settings expansion

The language in which a blog entry's date is displayed can now be set seperately from the general blog language settings.(109305, 109542) The language option can be set by accessing "Date Language" from the blog entry date "Compose" option. Once set, the date for the blog entry will be displayed in the standard format for the specified language. In connection to this change, the following tags have also been added:

• MTBlogDateLanguage
• MTWebsiteDateLanguage

We, the Movable Type team, felt that in order to better strengthen communication between us and our users, it would make the most sense to provide our users with two separate Twitter accounts, each with it's own language support.

The primary Movable Type Twitter account (movabletype) will continue providing support in both Japanese and English from now until June 6th.

For those who have not yet followed us on Twitter, we hope you will take this opportunity to start following the Japanese team on our new account, "movabletypejp".

Thank you to all our followers (and future followers) for your continued support!

Dan Wolfgang, a talented plugin developer and member of the Movable Type community, recently wrote an informative blog entry on upgrading plugins for use with both Movable Type 4 and 5.

In the blog entry, Dan offers several tips based on difficulties he personally encountered, providing a useful resource for other MT developers. The topics he covers in the blog entry include:

• Version-specific content
• Form elements
• "Undefined Subroutine" errors
• Building menus
• Listing framework
• Popup dialogs
• Object listings in pop-up dialogs

Check out Dan's blog for more information on Movable Type plug-in development along with other tips and tricks!

We understand the major issues that have been and still plague the MT Plugins Directory and extend a heart-felt apology to all Movable Type users and developers regarding the seemingly neglected state of the directory.

There are several small changes to the directory that have been made, taking effect from today.A much larger scale renewal of the Plugin Directory is being planned for release later on in the year.

Details on the small update

Because of the continuous issues with the old plugin database, we have migrated all information from the older directory to the current directory. Also, as there were more input forms than necessary, we reduced the number of forms as much as possible.

A new "theme" listing has been added to the top page. Any themes registered under the "theme" category will be displayed on the top page under this listing.

Plans for future rennovation

Today's changes and additions should be viewed as temporary patches in order to normalize directory use for the time being.

During this year, we plan on completely revamping the plugins directory registration system. We will provide more information once we have settled on the specifics for the new plugins directory, and we appreciate your continued patience during this time period.

We apologize again to our users and developers who have had to use the out-dated system up until now. We are working hard to make the directory easier to use and with the ability to provide more up-to-date information on all available plugins.

FAQ

As a developer, what should I do?

If you have plugins or themes that are compatible with MT5, then please register them to the directory.

If you have plugins or themes that are compatible with MT5, then please register them to the directory.

Starting from now, every registered plugin will be sent to our office for review, at which point it will then be published to the directory. Because of the need to verify all registered plugins, there will be a small delay between registration and publication, however, that delay should only take, at most, a few days.

How can I recommend my favorite plugins and themes to other users?

If you are not a developer but want to help promote a plugin that you use often and enjoy: in the registration form field, there is a check-box labeled "Original Author Name." Make sure this box is checked and then enter the developer's name.

This release does not include security related patches.

Users who have already upgraded to Movable Type 5.2.2 and who use a database other than MySQL, do not need to upgrade to Movable Type 5.2.3.

• 5.2.3 release notes

Six Apart has found a security issue and fixed it in Movable Type 4.2 and MT 4.3. For those of you who use Movable Type 4.2 and 4.3, Six Apart strongly recommends that you upgrade to the latest released version of Movable Type or execute the following steps immediately. This vulnerability does not exist in Movable Type versions 5.0 or later, including the latest Movable Type, version 5.2.2.

The Issue

Through the upgrade program of MT (mt-upgrade.cgi), OS command injection and SQL injection can be performed, and potentially open a vulnerability. This issue may occur when mt-upgrade.cgi can be executed on the Internet.

Versions affected

• Movable Type 4.2x, 4.3x
• Movable Type Open Source 4.2x, 4.3x
• Movable Type Enterprise 4.2x, 4.3x

The Fix for Movable Type 4.38 users

Six Apart will provide the patch code file for Movable Type 4.38 users. Please download and unzip the patch code file. Download "lib / MT / Upgrade.pm" file from Movable Type in use for backup. Then, upload unzipped Upgrade.pm, and replace it.

• MT4.38-Upgrade-Patch.zip

The Fix for those who cannot apply the patch code file (users who do not use Movable Type 4.38)

Those who cannot use the patch code file, please execute one of the following solutions.

• Remove the read permission and execute permission from mt-upgrade.cgi, so that external users on the Internet will not be able to run the mt-upgrade.cgi.
• Or delete the mt-upgrade.cgi.

Since Six Apart has already terminated the support of Movable Type 4.2x, we strongly recommend upgrading to the latest version of Movable Type 5.2.2. If you are concerned with any issues resulting from the implementation of this patch, please test this in a development environment first.

Product Life Cycle Milestones

Below are definitions for the different lifecycle phases included in the chart below

[GA (General Availability)]

During the period between GA and EOS (End of Sales), security patches and bug fixes will be released on a regular basis, with official technical support available for a fee.

[EOS (End of Sales)]

EOS designates the closure of sales for a specific product version. Major (x.0) and feature (0.x) releases for the product version released during the GA period will start to become available. Once EOS has passed, the product version released during the GA period will no longer be available for purchase. Bug fixes (0.0x) and security updates will continue to be released until EOM (End of Maintenance), and official technical support will continue to be available for a fee.

[EOM (End of Maintenance)]

EOM signifies the end of official Six Apart maintenance support for a specific product version. EOM occurs 12 months after EOS (End of Sales). At this point, the product version will go into what is defined by Six Apart as a security maintenance period: only patches for security breaches deemed critical by Six Apart will continue to be released until EOL (End of Life). It is possible to continue using the product at this time, however the user must understand that, following EOM, official technical support will no longer be available. In addition, only the latest version of the most recent feature release will be classified as EOM, with all previous versions classified as EOL (End of Life). If official technical support is necessary, the user will first have to upgrade to the most recent product release.

[EOL (End of Life)]

EOL signifies that a product version has reached the end of it's life span. It will no longer go under maintenance and will no longer receive bug fixes, security patches, or additional feature updates. Third party support may remain available, but there will no longer be any official Six Apart technical support. It is possible to continue using the product at this time, however the user must be aware of the security risk in doing so. It is strongly recommended that the user upgrade to the most recent version of the product before EOL occurs.

* Version Support Phase Chart

This chart shows the dates of each phase (GA, EOS, EOM, EOL - refer to above definitions) for each version of Movable Type. Note that for Movable Type 4.38, the period between EOM and EOL has been extended from 12 months to 24 months.

Contact Us

Please send any questions concerning the product life cycle policy via following page:

• http://www.movabletype.com/info/contact.html

I was one of the attendees at the "Movable Type Idea Exchange in NYC" in October earlier this year, and as a speaker, I made several promises:

• To provide English translations of Japanese plugins
• To provide English translations of MT related Japanese documents
• To renovate the plugin directory
• To share knowledge, in English, on the Github wiki

I introduced several Japanese plugins recently, and am currently in the process of fulfilling the rest of the promises that I made during the conference.

Though it have not been perfect, but as of now, we have officially started translating documents and articles currently available on the "MovableType.jp" website for publication in English on the "MovableType.org" website.

New documents are located here:

• http://www.movabletype.org/documentation/mt5/

Developers notes and plugins will be continue to be translated. Also, we plan on revisiting previously published MT4 related documents in order to update them with more recent screenshots and information.

Finally, several articles on the Github Wiki page that were previously only available in Japanese have been translated and published in English.

Little by little, we hope to bring the international MT community up to speed with what is happening on the Japan side. Stay tuned for future updates!

For more information on bug fixes, please refer to the following release notes:

• 5.2.2 release note

About the New Functions

Boilerplate Function

The boilerplate text function lets users register often repeated text, such as for event announcements, which can then be recalled and inserted in blog entries. Boilerplate can be pre-formatted using Markdown or the Rich Text Editor.

For more information on using the boilerplate function, please refer to the manual below:

• Boilerplate

New Theme: Rainier

The new blog theme, "Rainier" is now available for use with Movable Type.

"Rainier" is a multi-device compatible theme based on Media Queries (CSS). "Rainier" offers header banner and navigation customization options.

Key Features

• Ability to evaluate the user's access method and automatically changes site design to best match the user's environment
• Customizable thumbnail image used when sharing your website on Facebook or other social media related sites
• Blog entry summary list pagination (divided into 10 entries per page)
• Bread crumb navigation
• Ability to preview blog posts before posting, as well as easily edit their appearance
• Multi-device compatibility via Media Queries for Classic Blog designs (such as the Cityscape series and the Minimalist series)

For more information on using "Rainier", please refer to the manual below:

• Setting Up "Rainier"

Movable Type 5.2.2 (the new numbering) will be released in December and will be the newest version of Movable Type 5.2. We will start the new numbering policy with this new release.

**Please continue reading for more details on this update**

Until now, major releases were written as such: 4.0, 5.0, etc., with minor releases for each version, including minor bug fixes and new functions, written as such: 4.x, 5.x, etc. Any further releases after the initial minor release would be written with the additional version number in the second decimal slot, such as MT5.12.

Starting with the release of Movable Type 5.2.2, instead of adding a second decimal slot for additional small scale releases, a new decimal point and a new number will be added. For example, MT5.22 under the old system would become MT5.2.2 under the new system.

Why did we feel this change was necessary?

Primarily because of our new upcoming cloud service, currently in development by the Movable Type development team.

In general, major releases and upgrades happen every two to three years. During that two to three year period between major releases, and excluding emergency security updates, minor upgrades to the most current version of MT are released every six months to a year.

The main problem with the old release system is that huge gaps between major releases translate to delays in releasing new innovative features, bug fixes and enhanced compatibility for preferred browsers.

When the new Movable Type cloud service is in place, we will be able to release patches and new innovative feature updates every 1 to 2 months, enhancing the value of your Movable Type installation.

These new bug fixes, patches and additional features will be reflected not only in the cloud version of MT, but also in all purchased self hosted releases and will become permanent additions to feature software versions of Movable Type.

Future MT Version Numbering Policy

In order to more easily organize future releases, we decided to make a minor change to the version numbering method. In short, from now on, instead of releases being numbered as such: 5.21, 5.22, etc., they will be numbered like this: 5.2.1, 5.2.2, etc.

Please note there is a possibility that future releases may not follow a strict chronological order, with some numbers being skipped over. An example release order might be as follows:

5.2 => 5.2.2 => 5.2.3 => 5.2.5

We hope this numbering change will make it easier for our users to keep track of the most recent versions of MT, and allow you to keep up to date on the latest features to improve your experience using our software. We are looking forward to the advantages the new cloud system will bring to the future of Movable Type and hope you will be excited when it is released!

During the "Movable Type Idea Exchange" conference held in New York in October, I introduced several Japanese developed plug-ins. Today, I am happy to announce that approximately 40 of those previously Japanese only plug-ins are being released to the international community.

Along with the new releases, some previously released plug-ins have been given upgraded manuals, reference links and screen shots. Please try out these brand new plug-ins and see what the Japanese community has developed!

A list of currently available plug-ins are available here:

• http://www.movabletype.org/2012_Japanese_Plugins/index.html

Movable Type users working with Firefox browser version 16 or later cannot save selected categories and folders after checking checkboxes. This issue appears in the following areas of the Movable Type CMS:

• Choosing categories in the entry editor
• Choosing folders in page editor
• Choosing folders on the uploading assets form

If you cannot choose categories and folders in above situation, please apply the appropriate patch file for your using version.

• For Movable Type 4.38
• For Movable Type 5.07
• For Movable Type 5.14
• For Movable Type 5.2

The patch includes these files:

• mt-static/js/common/List.js
• mt-static/js/mt_core_compact.js

Installation:

• Donload and unzip the patch file
• Upload List.js and mt_core_compact.js to each of the following directories.
  • /path/to/mt/mt-static/js/common/List.js
  • /path/to/mt/mt-static/js/mt_core_compact.js

If you have changed the location of the mt-static directory, please place the patch files in the directory that is appropriate for your installation.

Do you know what's special about October 8th? October 8th is Movable Type's birthday! 11 years ago, on October 8th, 2001, Movable Type version 1 was released. Since then, thanks to the use and feedback from users of Movable Type for blog and website management, Movable Type has evolved into the form it is today. Your continued feedback and support through advice, praise and critique will ensure that Movable Type will continue evolving over the next 11 years. We appreciate every one's help and we definitely could not have come this far without you!

As part of the celebration, let's see how Movable Type has changed over the past 11 years by comparing Movable Type administration screen screen shots!

Movable Type 1.x

The first version of Movable Type was released October 8th, 2001. This was just after the not to be forgotten September 11 attacks and many Americans were still in shock. Many people wanted to talk about what was happening in the world to better understand the situation and come to grips with the new future. For whatever reason, people were drawn in to Movable Type and what it could do, and the download and use of the software spread like wildfire, eventually leading to a widespread blogging movement, with "Blogger" being another big name and blogging revolutionary.

Original release articles for Movable Type still exist on MovableType.com. On MovableType.com, articles around the first release still remains. Reading over the first couple of entries, it is obvious that Mena and Ben, the original developers, were caught unawares by how well known Movable Type became over such a period of time.

Movable Type 2.x

Movable Type version 2 was released in March, 2002. The most notable addition to version 2 was the implementation of the Trackback function. (Although actually, trackback functions weren't made available until version 2.2.) By using trackback, bloggers could exchange their opinions and start discussions with one another.

From version 2.5, internationalization options were added. As people from all over the world, not just English speaking countries, were interested in blogging using the Movable Type software, language packs for major languages around the world were created and made available to the public.

Movable Type 3.x

Movable Type version 3 was released in May 2004. At that time, public recognition of the word "blog" had soared, and Internet service companies started creating their own original blogging services.

The phrase "business blog" was also born at this time. Companies started to use blogs for PR purposes, this in turn helping to make communication between businesses and consumers easier than before and more direct.

Movable Type 4.x

Movable Type 4 was released in August, 2007. At this point, six years had passed since the original release of Version 1. MT4 featured the first radical change to the Movable Type administration screen. Site navigation was changed from a vertical to horizontal layout, and the navigation bar itself was now black.

MT4 also introduced several new functions, one of which was the new ability to create web pages from within Movable Type. Other features included the inclusion of hour and minute time records for published blog entries as well as hierarchical blog entry organization.

Multiblog, a function of aggregating data over multiple blogs, was introduced, and template tags were enhanced, offering support for functions such as four arithmetic operations and conditional branching.

The ability to create and include custom fields became available from version 4.1. This function helped further define Movable Type as scalable CMS software.

Movable Type 5.x

The Japanese engineering team started leading the development of Movable Type from MT version 5, which was released in January, 2010.

MT5 introduced the Website function. By using both the Website and Blog functions, users could easily create, manage and maintain entire websites. The Theme function was also introduced, and custom field functions were further enhanced.

In version 5.1, the Listing framework, enabling users to easily sort through large amounts of data, was implemented. In version 5.2, a TinyMCE based rich text editor was introduced in order to help users create and edit blog entries.

And now we are back to the present! So, how did you like that blast from the past? As you can tell just by glancing through the screen shots, Movable Type has changed a lot from its humble beginnings. However, throughout all the years, one thing remains the same: Movable Type will never stop evolving in order to make your user experience better!

In closing, I'd like to know...what was the first version of Movable Type that you used? Do you have any fond memories of Movable Type from over the years?

Happy birthday, Movable Type!