Movable Type Pro and 4.2 – blogs are leaning towards social networking side

On August 13 (hope it won’t be bad luck!) Six Apart  released a new version of its world acclaimed blogging software: Movable Type 4.2.
This new release show, according to Six Apart, where the blogging is going. Being one of the leaders (along WordPress) who are we to say otherwise ? Actually, we DO have a saying: when MovableType wasn’t open source WordPress was (still is). And we, the users, embraced WordPress more than MovableType, forcing them to go open-source too .

So, what is new in this 4.2 release?

Many things, if we look at their blog announcement.
Let’s number some of them here (snippet from their blog):

* 100% Free AntiSpam. TypePad AntiSpam is the best comment spam prevention service on the web. And it’s 100% free no matter how many comments you get, plus it’s open source and Akismet API compatible so it’s easy to hook up to your site. With MT 4.2, it’s also built right in to Movable Type.

* It’s fast. Movable Type’s smart caching only publishes the parts of the page that change, and the core engine’s been radically revamped to make it more efficient. The result? Using your current templates, publishing can be two to three times faster, right out of the box. Some testers have seen results with publishing up to ten times as fast or more.

* Better APIs. OpenID suppport, OAuth libraries, and the ability to add in plugins to connect with the iPhone, Action Streams and more are all built right in. And all of your Movable Type 4 plugins should keep working just fine with this update, or have been updated to work even better in 4.2.

* Templates are super simple. Movable Type has always been designed so you don’t need a ton of plugins to do fancy things with your site’s design. But with all that power, our community told us that we also needed to make sure templates were still easy to understand. So in Movable Type 4.2, templates are vastly simplified, and easier than ever to customize. And live template previews even let you see design changes before they’re published on your site.

* Plus all the power of Movable Type 4. A powerful built-in asset management system. Integrated widget management. The smartest template editor around. The ability, as always, to manage an unlimited number of blogs and authors all in one place. Industry-leading support for new technologies and features. And an absolutely unparalleled community of passionate developers, designers, bloggers, and experts.

On top of these new features of Movable Type version 4.2 the Pro version of Movable Type adds the following (from their blog also):

* Membership. It’s easy to allow anyone on the web to register on your site, or to sign in with Movable Type’s industry-leading OpenID support. Once they’re in, your site’s members get full-fledged customizable profiles, personalized user pictures (avatars), and can follow their friends or other site members they’re interested in.

* Everyone’s invited. You can easily add full-featured forums, community blogs and group blogs to your site, and since Movable Type has always managed an unlimited number of blogs in one interface (like WordPress MU), you can keep track of all those conversations using a single set of tools.

* Ratings and Recommendations. Any registered user on your site can vote for content they like, making it easy to create “most popular” or “most recommended” lists on your site. You can even create your own voting communities within your site — think “Digg in a box”.

* User-generated content. Any member of your community can, with appropriate permissions, submit content for publishing on your site. Administrators have full ability to review submissions, and submitted posts show up on user profiles right next to their comments and other activity.

Note that Movable Type Pro is free for personal use but it is NOT free for commercial use! Movable Type 4.2 is free for all.

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Basically, step by step, this blogging software goes towards a social network software with blogging being on the center stage. You might say “Oh no! Not another social network!”. And you might be right. It adds to the noise which is already there considering that many white label social networking software  already have blog option incorporated in their offer. We have to find a way to manage all that noise.

Now, with all these features I’m wondering if it’s a better platform than WordPress  (which powers this site among hundreds of thousands other sites).

Probably not, because WordPress it’s not just sitting still. They are developing BuddyPress  (BuddyPress was a set of plugins written for WordPress MU – multiuser by a third party and was acquired by WordPress later on).

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The new BuddyPress is based on WordPress MU core and still will be a set of plugins (friends, extended user profiles, private messaging, groups, status updates, photo albums and a plugin for a feature which resembles Twitter).

In the end, social networks and blogging converged and will be merging soon like with other software happened. Social networking is everywhere these days.

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