Movable Type.org

The release of our iPhone plugin for Movable Type is a tough act to follow. It has been very well received and has been the tipping point for many to switch to Movable Type from other platforms.

But a lot has happened since we released iMT. For those of you not closely following our regular flow of betas, we released Movable Type 4.01 - a release we recommend all Movable Type users to upgrade to. It contains a number of key fixes, updates and a security enhancement. Most notably however is a fix that provides a remarkable boost to Movable Type's performance and responsiveness. Users have reported seeing a dramatic decrease in the time it takes to publish their web sites as well as an increase in the responsiveness of the application.

Of course Movable Type 4.01 also contained a number of key fixes to support the release of our first pack or "solution": the Movable Type Enterprise Solution. I will refer those interested in that specific product to our corporate Movable Type website. However I would like to highlight several key resources that we created for our customers that operate at an enterprise scale, but that we think have a general relevance to anyone aspiring to build a blog and web site as large as Boing Boing, Seed Magazine, Huffington Post, the Gothamist network of blogs and many others. Specifically:

• Scalable Publishing Models - a guide to asynchronous and background publishing in Movable Type 4.
• Movable Type System Architecture Guide - a document describing the various ways one could architect Movable Type in a multi-server environment.

Then in this week's Weekly Six Apart Hackathon engineers built several plugins that user have been asking for:

• Template Hammer - in response to many novice users' concerns about the complexity of Movable Type's default templates, Brad Choate created Template Hammer, a plugin that will flatten your templates eliminating all the various includes and creating a simple and consolidated set of templates that are larger in size, but for some much easier to understand.
• Ghostwriter - Beau Smith, the interface engineer behind MT4, and now a burgeoning plugin developer, created a plugin in direct response to what members of ProNet had been inquiring about: the ability to change the author of a page or entry from the compose screen.

With our first and last planned maintenance release behind us, almost all of Movable Type's most popular plugins updated to work with MT4 there has never been a better time to upgrade to Movable Type or try out Movable Type for the first time!