SixApart have launched a plugin for MovableType that offers a similar activity stream service to Facebook and Plaxo, but you get to host it. The Action Streams plugin, like Facebook and Plaxo, pulls your data from other services and lists it on the page, for example blog posts, Flickr photos, Tweets and more. The plugin does rely on having MovableType installed, but is self hosted, meaning that you control the list, including privacy settings and data ownership. The plugin can also be used to aggregate activity from a group as well as an individual, providing a portal or front page to groups of all sizes. This is a good move from SixApart at a time where open standards and open access are quickly building momentum from being niche desires to mainstream wants. SixApart open sourced MovableType in December and it still has a long way to go to recapture its once dominant position as the blogging platform provider of choice, but plugins like this will certainly help them along the way. → Read More
SixApart has launched a new version of the their Movable Type (MT) blogging platform, Movable Type Community Solution (MTCS) that takes blogging into the realms of forum hosting, with some nice 2.0 touches. Other sites have reported that the new version is something akin to a Ning competitor, but this isn’t the case. I asked Six Apart’s VP Anil Dash exactly what we are looking at MTCS is about rescuing the huge parts of the web that are still suffering under circa-1997 technologies. I call it the “Dark Web” — all these conversations that are taking place on bulletin boards, forums, and message boards, but they don’t have any of the usability or identity benefits of modern web technologies. And that’s leaving aside niceties like good URLs (for Google indexing) and tagging and rich media support. I mean, you just don’t see a forum where you can easily upload video or audio assets, for example. MTCS generates a member profile for every user in a system, providing a profile page that shows commenting, interactions etc, but Dash says that isn’t the exciting part: If I look at your profile, and the only conversations you’ve inspired are flame wars, it’s easy to know you’re not a valuable contributor. But to the contrary, if every comment or post you write gets marked as a favorite, then I can start to think about promoting you (using MT4′s built-in permissions system) to be an author or administrator, either on the forums or on other blogs in the system. Maybe you can even make static content pages. (Just imagine, instead of having to “pin a post” at the top of a forum to define policy, you can just *make a policy page*. So obvious, but such an improvement.) The cross action integration is where SixApart feels that MTCS excels: Upload a user picture for yourself, and it’s stored (and tagged) in MT4′s built-in asset management system. Vote for something as a favorite, and it shows up on the MT4 dashboard as favorite content, so other authors know it’s what the community is looking for. And best of all, administration and community participation features are separate, as they’ve always been in blogging tools — that fixes the problem forums have always had of trying to shove administration and management tools into the user-facing part of the site. MTCS supports third party widgets (SixApart is a member → Read More
SixApart have released a new beta version of popular blogging content management system Movable Type. Moveable Type 4.0 is the first major release of Movable Type since MT 3.0 in 2004 and comes complete with a market disrupting announcement: SixApart will open source Movable Type before the end of the third quarter. I spoke to SixApart’s Vice President Anil Dash prior to the launch and he explained that SixApart sees the move to an open source Movable Type as going back to SixApart’s roots. There’s a lot of history between MT users and SixApart. Although Movable Type was never an open source platform, prior to the release of MT 3.0 many treated MT as if it was open source. The decision to enforce licensing with the release of MT 3.0 caused widespread outrage in 2004 (including rather vocally from myself) and in many ways was a tipping point that delivered WordPress from relative obscurity to being the popular blogging CMS it is today. Dash said that commercially SixApart had no choice other than to enforce licensing at the time. However SixApart in 2007 is a thriving company with a broad suite of popular products, including TypePad, Vox and LiveJournal, and today can afford to give back to the blogging community. The new version of Movable Type is a radical departure from previous versions. MT4 includes more than 50 new features including a new installation and upgrade wizard, easier and more powerful template management tools that speed site development, all new default templates and themes, and a completely redesigned user interface focused on streamlining common tasks. MT4 as social media platform allows users to turn their readers into communities through Movable Type’s new community management features, with the ability to give users the right to post, add and share rich text and media posts with photos, videos, and audio. MT4 also includes a new ratings framework that enables a variety of recommendation features. Scalability is dramatically improved with built in support for database caching through Data::Object Driver and Memcached, incorporating technology that powers Vox, LiveJournal and TypePad, as well as Web 2.0 sites including AOL, Microsoft, Digg, Wikipedia, Craigslist and Facebook. The new licensing model once MT 4 is opened source will be similar to MySQL, the paid version will include technical and product support from SixApart. I have a long history with SixApart that isn’t worth repeating here. As a → Read More
SixApart released today version 1.5 of their enterprise-scale blogging software MovableType. Today’s release is largely in response to customer requests since the 1.0 release of MT Enterprise in July. New features include full LDAP integration for granular management of users and groups and support for SQL Server. MovableType Enterprise supports multiblog aggregation, allowing a large number of blogs across an enterprise to be viewed centrally and makes new blogs easy to clone in large numbers with windows and UNIX installers. We covered the company’s move into enterprise scale blogging in March. MT has been offering blogging software for 5 years and only recently rolled out an enterprise addition. How viable are WordPress and Automattic as enterprise competition? Chris Alden, now at MovableType, says they never see WordPress in the enterprise. The company says that among Fortune 500 companies with blogs, 75%-80% use some SixApart product – either MovableType or TypePad. That’s an impresive number and though they say the launch of MT Enterprise 1.0 was particularly succesful, they didn’t have any numbers they would give me on that. Hopefully we’ll soon see some interesting integration of the newly acquired Rojo RSS reader. For now though, today’s release appears to be based primarily on making MovableType Enterprise truly suitable for enterprise use than it is on adding anything too glamorous. Richard McManus, a happy MoveableType user, has more. → Read More
SixApart, the creators of popular blogging platforms TypePad and MovableType will be releasing a set of new features and services for their products directly aimed at the growing business market for blog software. Currently there are a large number of corporations already publishing blogs using SixApart software and the latest releases are part of a broader strategy to better support and to grow this enterprise customer base. The first software release to spin out of the new strategy will be Typepad Business Class, a new TypePad edition that will be suited for companies with high-traffic sites who wish to setup a blog or multiple blogs to communicate with their audience. TypePad Business Class will be launching today and will contain a number of technical enhancements over classic TypePad that are tailored for enterprise requirements. For starters there will be an improved permissions structure with up to 4 levels of administrator access which can be used to control access to all aspects of the blog (such as ability to post, comment management, design editing). They have also made it easy to setup additional blogs and to control all aspects of the corporations blog design so that it can be tailored to match their corporate identity. The storage allocation with the Business Class service will be 4GB while bandwidth allocation will be 40GB per month with the price coming in at $89.95 per month. Other plans with more storage and bandwidth allocation will also be available at higher prices. SixApart will also accompany the technical improvements with service level agreements that will guarantee a certain level of uptime, an essential requirement if they wish to attract the big corporations onto their platform. The SLA being offered only guarantees 99% uptime (which is still 4 days a year of downtime, that isn’t guaranteed) but it is the first such guarantee from a blogging provider. SixApart will also be holding seminars to help companies start blogging, the first of these is the Blog Business Summit on March 16, 2006 in Los Angeles. Also as part of the new business strategy MovableType will be getting a makeover with some enterprise features such as integration with LDAP directories and other authentication services, better anti-spam protection, Oracle database support (amongst others) and customizable email support. The business-grade MovableType doesn’t have a launch date or a price yet but it is currently in beta in Japan and should → Read More
