Movable Type.org

We are pleased to announce that we just released the sixth beta for Movable Type 4.0. Our focus in this release was almost entirely upon fixing bugs, reproducing issues reported by customers, responding to your feedback and bringing even more polish to the application. We tackled a lot of issues this week, but Beta Testers: we still want to hear from you! Did we finally fix that bug you reported or that was nagging you? Or is there still something that vexes you about the product that we still haven't addressed? Please, leave a comment and let us know.

So, while there are no new big features we can surprise you with in this beta, perhaps this is a good opportunity to highlight five features you may not have known about:

• Reply to Comment - users can now reply to comments posted by the readers directly from within the application. In other words, authors no longer need to switch back and forth between the application and their published blog to approve and then reply to comments left by their community.
• Captchas for Anonymous Commenters - Movable Type 4.0 allows users to authenticate in a variety of ways before leaving a comment, but many bloggers prefer to allow users to comment anonymously as well. However blogger hate the idea of leaving the barn door open for spammers. That is why we built CAPTCHA support right into Movable Type so that bloggers can require anonymous users to perform a simple turing test to prove that they are in fact: human.
  
• Quick Post Bookmarklets - If you want a quick and easy way to create a new post based upon any page you happen to be visiting on the Internet, create a "Quick Post Bookmarklet" by dragging the "Quick Post" link found on your "Create Entry" screen into your browser's shortcut toolbar. Then navigate to your favorite blog, highlight some text and click the bookmark you just created to see what happens next.
  
• Trusted OpenID Endpoints - MT4 has built in support for authenticating any valid OpenID user and endpoint. We also built in the ability to provide a customized OpenID login experience for trusted OpenID endpoints (take a look at MT4's customized OpenID logins for Vox and LiveJournal for example). We also made it possible for plugin developers to register their own trusted OpenID endpoints, logos and login forms allowing third parties to make any OpenID endpoint look and feel like a first class authentication provider.
• Syntax Help for Markdown, Smartypants and Textile - I have been using Markdown for years, but for whatever reason I simply cannot commit the link syntax to memory. With MT4 I no longer need to because the formatting buttons like bold, italics, blockquote, strike-through, link creation, bulleted list, et al all work regardless of whether you are in WYSIWYG mode or Markdown mode.

There are so many new little features like the ones above n Movable Type that it is virtually impossible to list them all. Have you found a feature you really like? Tell us about it.