Not a developer? Go to MovableType.com

News

Movable Type 4.2 is here!

By Byrne Reese
Posted August 12, 2008, in News.

Today is one of the most exciting days in the history of Movable Type. Our community's hard work has yielded one of the most significant and important releases in Movable Type's history: Movable Type 4.2. This new release is the fastest and most secure release of Movable Type ever. Plus it comes packed with new features that you've been asking for:

  • Threaded comments
  • An out-of-the-box solution for comment spam
  • Live template previews
  • Paginated search results and entry pagination for dynamically published blogs
  • Redesigned template and widget management areas
  • Simple, simple, simple templates for quick and easy site customization

However, there is another reason though why we feel this is such a significant milestone for Movable Type and for all of us who manage communities online: Today, we introduce Movable Type Pro.

overview-1.jpgMovable Type Pro is the convergence of three critical Movable Type capabilities: blogging, content management and social networking. Movable Type Pro is now the only integrated social publishing platform on the market today. MT Pro combines the power and flexibility of the open source core Movable Type with the rich content management capabilities of the Movable Type Professional Pack, and all the community features of the Movable Type Community Solution. Then, working closely with our community we have also refined our licenses and pricing to make these features and capabilities available to more people then ever before for the very reasonable price of free.

Starting today the Movable Type Pro Blogger License is available for free to anyone and everyone not running an official business. With this license, users can have:

  • unlimited blogs
  • unlimited authors
  • unlimited community members
  • unlimited everything

That's right, the Blogger license does not impose any caps upon its use and is free of the greatest barrier of all: cost.

Finally, where our personal and commercial licenses were sometimes unclear in this respect, the Blogger License allows you to make money and thrive. Frankly, we know that people get their start using free tools and then start businesses and grow their sites based on that foundation. So, once you're ready to set up shop as a business around your blog, we know you'll want to step up to a commercial license to get full support and access to the phenomenal team we've assembled at Six Apart Services.

But that is, as we say around here, all part of the "dot com" side of Movable Type. Movable Type 4.2 is also a great release for developers and users of the open source version of Movable Type. Here are some of the great new features developers will love:

  • Pluggable Search Backend - we have worked hard to make Movable Type's search infrastructure faster, but we realize that some may want to swap it out with a home grown or more powerful search engine. MT 4.2 makes that possible.
  • Extensible Search - by default Movable Type searches page and entries, but some users may want assets, comments, TrackBacks, users, or their own custom data types to appear in search results. MT 4.2 makes that possible through very simple, YAML-based plugins.
  • OpenID 2.0 Support - Movable Type now fully supports OpenID 2.0, being among the only to support it right out of the box.
  • Bundled OAuth Libraries - we recognize that open standards like OpenID and OAuth will become the underpinnings of technologies to comes, which is why we have bundled OAuth libraries into the core of Movable Type to make building plugins and applications that rely upon these technologies easier.
  • Fully documented core template tags - a little overdue, we will be the first to admit, but all of the core template tags have been fully documented.
  • Performance optimization tools - our performance logging framework can be used by developers to hone in on parts of their code that can be optimized.

But if you are a developer or a blogger, a professional or an enterprise, there is no better time than now to run your site on the same platform that powers some of the leading web sites and brands today, like AMC, Talking Points Memo, Kenneth Cole, the Washington Post and O'Reilly Radar. Download the open source version of Movable Type today, or head on over to the newly redesigned MovableType.com web site to download or get Movable Type Pro.

Upgrading to Movable Type 4.2

To help users upgrade we have assembled a great deal of documentation to assist in the process with our Movable Type 4.2 Upgrade Guide. Then once, you have the software installed and Movable Type has upgraded itself, documentation is available to help you update your web site to take advantage of Movable Type Pro's Community features, and to help everyone optimize the performance of their web site.

Back

36 Comments

luckyman

luckyman on August 12, 2008, 8:10 p.m. Reply

It looks so fast to release 4.2. So I have something to do now. Upgrading.

Carlo

Carlo on August 12, 2008, 8:20 p.m. Reply

How long till the download for 4.2 is available? I’m so anxious!!! MT Pro news is only second to MT4 news :p

Arvind Satyanarayan

Arvind Satyanarayan on August 12, 2008, 8:23 p.m. Reply

[this is good]. Great work Team MT!

Matthew Spencer

Matthew Spencer on August 12, 2008, 8:42 p.m. Reply

It really is a lot faster. Thanks dudes!

Sara

Sara on August 12, 2008, 8:56 p.m. Reply

As I said on the ProNet list, this just keeps getting better and better. Any news on when the Mid-Century templates/style is out of beta?

Matthew Spencer

Matthew Spencer on August 12, 2008, 10:39 p.m. Reply

Is MT pro part of MTOS? Are MTCS features like forum templates included?

Byrne Reese

Byrne Reese on August 12, 2008, 10:47 p.m. Reply

Movable Type refers the 100% open source core that the Movable Type Pro product is built on top of.

Movable Type Pro exclusively contains the following template sets or “themes”:

  • Community Blog
  • Community Forums
  • Professional Web Site (formally known as “Universal Template Set”)

Movable Type Pro is free for most, but technically not open source.

Sara

Sara on August 12, 2008, 11:14 p.m. Reply

I must be missing something Byrne, but I cannot see where we are able to download MTPro anywhere on the .com site. All links leads to 4.12

PW

PW on August 13, 2008, 12:11 a.m. Reply

Just as Sara said… I was wondering is 4.2 the same product or is there another location to do the pro? Plus, because I have a free 5-commercial license for MT4.1 (compliments of sixapart), is it possible to change it to pro?

Alexander  Mikhalev

Alexander Mikhalev on August 13, 2008, 2:31 a.m. Reply

Well done! Thank you very much for professional templates and community edition

tsingson

tsingson on August 13, 2008, 5:37 a.m. Reply

how about the MT open source commnity version to download ?? the 4.2RC 5 had release the commity version for free download, but why the 4.2 stable version open source only MTOS version but no any MTCS version ??

dug

dug on August 13, 2008, 6:37 a.m. Reply

My jaw is down there lost somewhere under the table…

Never mind the surprise (I was getting ready to live with RC5 for a month) the licensing is exactly what is needed to grow the platform!

Very impressed, great work :-)

Edmund Dantes

Edmund Dantes on August 13, 2008, 6:42 a.m. Reply

I have a client that is a non-profit and they might benefit from this “Pro” version. What are the costs and benefits for a non-profit license? Please advise, thanks.

Dante

Kate

Kate on August 13, 2008, 6:58 a.m. Reply

Wonderful work! Well done! And what a happy surprise in MT Pro!! Thank you!

Nicholas

Nicholas on August 13, 2008, 7:06 a.m. Reply

Just want to say WOW! The Pro license is great. Exactly what was needed for many like me, who has a commercial license, but not a business and needed more than 5 authors.

In answer to others questions: MTOS, MT and MT PRO are not same. MTOS does not include the pro packages like “custom fields” and community features. MT PRO includes “custom field” etc. and basically it is based on MTOS. So why there are MTOS (free) and MT Pro (free)? Because you can use MTOS freely, edit the code, change the banner from “movable type” to your own and sell it as a new product. But you can’t edit the source code when you download the PRO version. You are not allowed to change the “movable type” logo (even the login page).

You can download the Pro version from movabletype.com download page.

Byrne Reese

Byrne Reese on August 13, 2008, 7:21 a.m. Reply

You can download MT Pro from the download page on mt.com! Is that where you were looking? Just click the big download tab.

If that is not what you see, or you still are downloading 4.12 then clearly there is a bug somewhere. Please contact me offline (byrne at sixapart dot com) and we can it resolved asap!

Byrne Reese

Byrne Reese on August 13, 2008, 7:33 a.m. Reply

“Movable Type” is the open source version of Movable Type and is available for download from movabletype.org. It is the core platform and the basis for the professional features found in our products on movabletype.com, like MT Pro.

“MTCS” or the Movable Type Community Solution is not available as such any more. We made that code available in beta form in anticipation of the MT Pro release and a desire to get that product tested and in the hands of as many people as possible.

The good news of course is that all the features found in MTCS can be found in MT Pro. No kidding - all of them. For the time being however, MTCS is not open source. But it is pretty gosh darn free! :)

Sara

Sara on August 13, 2008, 7:43 a.m. Reply

The site hadn’t yet changed to the new design last night, but it’s ok this morning :)

Ton

Ton on August 13, 2008, 8:00 a.m. Reply

@Edmund: if your client is non-profit he/she/they better find some money somewhere, ‘cause non-profits pay $196 for a five-author license. For that he/she/they get a year of 6A support, the Custom Fields commercial pack functionality and the forum stuff with the community pack. So the one benefit of the non-profit license is that it is cheaper than the regular edition. If the non-profit just wants/needs basic MT functionality and no custom fields and forum I’d say a non-profit license is too expensive: in that case the client is better off with MT Open Source.

demonsurfer

demonsurfer on August 13, 2008, 8:01 a.m. Reply

You’ve outdone yourselves - again! Thanks Byrne and co; how awesome is your awesomeness!

Dan Wolfgang

Dan Wolfgang on August 13, 2008, 10:21 a.m. Reply

6Aers, MT Team, and community contributors: thank you. This is great work all should be congratulated. But more important than that, this is a fun new toy to play with! Yay!

https://me.yahoo.com/slowly_rusting#c01a6

https://me.yahoo.com/slowly_rusting#c01a6 on August 13, 2008, 11:58 a.m. Reply

It sounds like a great update, especially the social networking features. Now if only I could get it to work…

I get the following message when running the upgrader:

Error during upgrade: Undefined subroutine &CustomFields::Upgrade::customfieldsmovemeta called at lib/MT/Upgrade.pm line 1145.

Any ideas?

tsingson

tsingson on August 13, 2008, 12:01 p.m. Reply

maybe you need to double check the upgrade guide or remove some plugins for upgrade precess, then , when upgrade success, to re-install the deleted plguins.

good luck!!

tsingson

tsingson on August 13, 2008, 12:05 p.m. Reply

but the MT pro is not free or open souce anymore , right????

Byrne Reese

Byrne Reese on August 13, 2008, 1:49 p.m. Reply

@tsingson - Movable Type Pro is not open source. However it is free for people not operating as an incorporated business.

We have tried to make this as simple as possible, but I realize how this can be confusing to some. I have started a topic in our forums (powered by MT Pro by the way) about this in case you or anyone else needs further clarification.

Byrne Reese

Byrne Reese on August 13, 2008, 3:17 p.m. Reply

@ https://me.yahoo.com/slowly_rusting#c01a6 - That is an alarming error. It almost looks as if you don’t have some of the components installed. What do you have in your addons directory?

Jon C

Jon C on August 13, 2008, 4:45 p.m. Reply

Seems the download has been removed? I’ve experienced some problems post-upgrade: http://www.jcaino.com/2008/08/mt-42-excitement-shortlived.html

Byrne Reese

Byrne Reese on August 13, 2008, 5:07 p.m. Reply

Just a transient error as we renamed a page and put in a redirect. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Sara

Sara on August 13, 2008, 5:09 p.m. Reply

The download is still there. Might have been a fluke

tsingson

tsingson on August 13, 2008, 9:05 p.m. Reply

to Byrne: thanks your feedback and clarify for MT pro.

wwwwolf [beastwithin.org]

wwwwolf [beastwithin.org] on August 14, 2008, 2:23 a.m. Reply

Thank you! Had some small hitches in the upgrade, and already damned the whole thing to hell, but it turns out it was plugin-related. (Insert funny accent here: “It’s always plugin-related…”)

4.2 looks very darn amazing, even when I’m probably not going to use Pro features. Keep up good work!

PW

PW on August 14, 2008, 10:16 a.m. Reply

You know, coming from a Joomla environment, I have to admit the new version of MT is definitely becoming a competitive product with growing features to also double as a full cms for business…which is why I am converting my Joomla design site to MT. I look forward to the ongoing development of MT for my clients.

MikeT

MikeT on August 15, 2008, 6:55 a.m. Reply

@Pixelwm,

I have some styles that I converted from WordPress here if you are interested in looking for other ideas.

Hyok Kim

Hyok Kim on August 15, 2008, 10:19 p.m. Reply

Great! Ease of installation/upgrade, flexibility in template control, fast publishing, and more I can’t count only with my fingers. :-)

Jim Walczak

Jim Walczak on October 6, 2008, 10:06 p.m. Reply

Threaded comments? I don’t see the plugin in MT 4.2 Pro. Is it just built in? If so, it doesn’t appear to be working on my install of a beta test area of my site

Mower Jack

Mower Jack on June 1, 2010, 4:19 a.m. Reply

how about the MT open source commnity version to download ?? the 4.2RC 5 had release the commity version for free download, but why the 4.2 stable version open source only MTOS version but no any MTCS version ?? Jack

Byrne Reese

Byrne Reese was previously the Product Manager of Movable Type at Six Apart, where he had also held positions as the Manager of Platform Technology and Product Manager for TypePad. Byrne is a huge supporter of the Movable Type user and developer community. He dedicates much of his time to promoting and educating people about Movable Type as well as building the tools and plugins for Movable Type that are showcased on Majordojo. He contributes regularly to open source; and he is an advocate for open protocols and standards like Atom and OpenID.

Website: http://profile.typekey.com/byrnereese