Movable Type 4: Open Source and OpenID

Surprisingly, at least to me Six Apart has announced a new version of blogging platform Movable Type today. I have hardly come across blogs running on Movable Type (MT) recently; most new blogs are powered by WordPress these days (and new platforms like Habari being developed while micro blogging applications like Twitter and Tumblr are attracting users).

The situation is much different to the time when I started reading blogs more regularly – early 2002 if I remember correctly; many blogs were MT powered back then. Also Six Apart has started working on more blogging platforms which all cater to different kinds of people: TypePad for more serious and business bloggers, LiveJournal for a younger, community focused crowd and Vox for a more personal and intimate approach to blogging. So a new version of MT is quite a surprise.

According to the Six Apart announcement experiences from all the other platforms will be integrated in Movable Type 4. One of the new features will be native support for OpenID which is applauded here, of course. No need for any plugins but a straight forward way to log in to blogs and comment on articles. Having LiveJournal creator and OpenID developer Brad Fitzpatrick on board there should be enough knowledge about it at Six Apart.
Probably even more noticeable is the annoucement that there will be an open source version (GPL license) of MT 4 available by the end of this year. That will hopefully help MT to attract people writing plugins to it again.

I don’t know what the final version will look like and if Movable Type can compete with WordPress again but I think it is encouraging to see one of the most important applications in the history of blogging being revamped.

[via Marshall Kirkpatrick]

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