One of the biggest concerns a lot of folks in the MT community have is, "Is Movable Type for me?" It's been easy to be confused -- MT has been available in versions for developers, individual bloggers, businesses, educational users, and enterprises. With MT4, we wanted to make things a little bit more sane, so that all of those audiences could be benefiting from each others' efforts and ideas, instead of feeling like the grass was greener on the other side.
From a technological standpoint, this was pretty straightfoward; MT4 is built on a single core platform for every kind of user, with "packs" of feature functionality layered on top to make the different versions have distinct features. This makes it really easy to have shared features make their way out to everyone at the same time.
For example, MT Enterprise got the built-in ability to clone blogs in your system last year, but we hadn't done a major feature release of non-enterprise MT since then, so the feature hadn't found its way out to regular users yet. We hated the idea that something that cool was limited to only one of our audiences, and not for any technical reasons, but just because we were keeping separate code bases. So now, a bunch of features that had been Enterprise-only have found their way into the MT4 core for everybody to benefit from.
This effort also has the benefit of eliminating some complexity -- nobody has to see features they don't need. Instead of worrying about turning certain advanced features off on your personal blog, we can leave those as features exclusively for enterprise users.
But perhaps most importantly, we've started to explain why we try to reach all these different audiences with our work. It's not just MT, it's our other platforms, too -- plenty of businesses use TypePad, and plenty of developers contribute code on LiveJournal, and lots of people share their stories on Vox. We think it's important, though, that the same potential that our platforms are unlocking for people be something that businesses, and yes, even enterprise businesses, can use, too.
So, if you want to understand why our efforts to help businesses and enterprises are important for the work we do in helping every individual blogger, take a look at "Why do you care about business blogs so much?" and maybe you can get a feel for some of the inspiration and motivation behind the business side of our community.
From a technological standpoint, this was pretty straightfoward; MT4 is built on a single core platform for every kind of user, with "packs" of feature functionality layered on top to make the different versions have distinct features. This makes it really easy to have shared features make their way out to everyone at the same time.
For example, MT Enterprise got the built-in ability to clone blogs in your system last year, but we hadn't done a major feature release of non-enterprise MT since then, so the feature hadn't found its way out to regular users yet. We hated the idea that something that cool was limited to only one of our audiences, and not for any technical reasons, but just because we were keeping separate code bases. So now, a bunch of features that had been Enterprise-only have found their way into the MT4 core for everybody to benefit from.
This effort also has the benefit of eliminating some complexity -- nobody has to see features they don't need. Instead of worrying about turning certain advanced features off on your personal blog, we can leave those as features exclusively for enterprise users.
But perhaps most importantly, we've started to explain why we try to reach all these different audiences with our work. It's not just MT, it's our other platforms, too -- plenty of businesses use TypePad, and plenty of developers contribute code on LiveJournal, and lots of people share their stories on Vox. We think it's important, though, that the same potential that our platforms are unlocking for people be something that businesses, and yes, even enterprise businesses, can use, too.
So, if you want to understand why our efforts to help businesses and enterprises are important for the work we do in helping every individual blogger, take a look at "Why do you care about business blogs so much?" and maybe you can get a feel for some of the inspiration and motivation behind the business side of our community.
Leave a comment