Network World and Movable Type

The Daily Dose is now on Movable Type, having joined the other bloggers from NW who are using this (blame Adam, who keeps changing his mind about which software he likes). - 9/6/02

Weblog geeks can tell at a glance that we use Movable Type for our Weblogs. Suits us fine - especially the way it supports multiple Weblogs and authors and has a simple workflow. The fact that it runs on a server is also a plus, since we often have folks posting from borrowed PCs at trade shows. - 7/3/03

After a couple of weeks futzing around with potential intranet platforms, we've settled on Movable Type. Huh, that Weblogging tool? Yeah, that's what I thought, initially, as well. But then I saw the Consumers Union site - which is done almost entirely in Movable Type. Turns out MT actually has some nice intranet-ish abilities, some of which I didn't know about. - 07/18/03

Our Movable Type-based intranet is getting closer to a launch date (smart us: We didn't set a specific date, though). - 08/08/03

Movable Type is a wonderful tool, but it absolutely sucks as a group blogging tool, in the sense that there's no way to manage all your blogs at once, for example, to kill identical comments across multiple Weblogs. You have to go into each single Weblog and delete each single spam comment by hand and then add the IP address of each offending spam to the individual blacklist for each individual Weblog (all those in favor of me getting off my butt and learning enough SQL to do all this at the database level, raise your hands). - 10/13/03

I've just been experimenting with Movable Type from Six Apart (see links below and yes, that is the way the company spells "Movable"). Movable Type is an open source blog written in Perl so it can run on most systems. I'm using it to provide my son's school with both a public and an intranet publishing platform that doesn't require much expertise.
Advertisement: And I'm impressed. This is quite a piece of engineering. - 10/15/03

As mentioned earlier, we're going live with a redesigned Fusion on Monday. We use Movable Type for both traditional Weblogs (like, oh, this one) and for reporters "notes" on the topics they cover (see our Security page for an excellent example). Problem: Each one of those blogs has its own template set, because Movable Type doesn't allow for user-defined fields in its database and we just have too much stuff we want to cram into our blog pages (for example, we have "topics" that determine the sort of ad that goes on a page). I was so not looking forward to modifying all those templates. But what Movable Type does have is a very nice plugin architecture. - 01/29/04

Six Apart has come out with the pricing for Ver. 3.0 of its Movable Type blogging tool (sorry, for their "publishing system"). A commercial license will set you back $700. That's not really all that outrageous for good quality software (we spent $500 for the software we use for our research links), but even for all that, the Ver. 3.0 license limits you to 15 Weblogs. We already have way more "blogs" than that (we're using Movable Type to power the reporter notes on all our research-center pages and use it on our intranet). I *might* be able to scrounge up $700 (well, $600 if I order now), but I'm really doubting our finance people would appreciate an unbudgeted bill for $1,400 (minus the $45 discount we'd get for the $300 in commercial MT licenses we've already purchased, that is). So our options are: Look for an alternative platform (hmm, Drupal, the open-source tool we're using for our new Feeds aggregator, has blogs built in); move our research-pages to our fancy-shmancy content management system (but then we'd lose the commenting function which was the main reason we put them in Movable Type to begin with). Or stick with Movable Type 2.6x, which is working just fine for us now. - 05/13/04

As I said yesterday, I don't object to paying for software (and yes, we paid for licenses for our current MT installations). What bothers me is the limitations in the licenses (which right off the bat would force us to buy two licenses). But, hey, they're free to charge what they want, and we're free to look at other platforms... - 05/14/04