Movable Type
For information on the printing term, see moveable type.Movable Type is a Web publishing system made by Six Apart. It is written in Perl, and relies on either MySQL, Berkeley DB, or SQLite to store its data. Movable Type is often used to manage frequently updated web content, especially Weblogs.
Contrary to popular belief Movable Type is not open source software. It is, however, free for personal use. Some limitations apply - see the release announcement for more information. Versions prior to 3.0 were available for commercial use for a one time $150 fee, although this price structure has been re-vamped and is currently in the process of being finalized in a scalable pricing structure. The personal, non-commercial use license for Movable Type says, although you may modify or create derivative copies of the Movable Type Software for you own use, you may not distribute modified or derivative copies of the Software.
The software supports several advanced features, such as multiple Weblogs, TrackBack pings, and site templates.
Movable Type has become immensely popular and this popularity has a particularly marked tendency to feed upon itself since: (1) the TrackBack and ping features of the Movable Type software results in a web of blogs with high interconnectivity, which in turn leads to high Google PageRank, (2) the active user group provides excellent support and thorough documentation and (3) the creation of a wide variety of plugins for doing just about everything that one might expect from a more complex content management system.
The most popular plugin at the time of writing (spring 2004), MT-Blacklist, is however, evidence of how the popularity of Movable Type has had a negative effect on the usability of the software. MT-Blacklist is an attempt to put a stop to the rising tide of blog/comment-spam, where spammers post bogus comments to Movable Type blogs, including a link to their site, in order to increase their Google PageRank. Movable Type 3.0 introduces comment registration, which should help reduce comment spam.
The current version is 3.0. Marked changes were made for the licensing (see the release announcement) of Movable Type upon the release of version 3.0. This caused some criticism by users of the software (see "trackbacks" at previous link) and the licensing structure is currently under review and revision by the software's authors.
TypePad, a hosted Weblog service operated by Six Apart, is powered by Movable Type.