MovableType 4 Beta released

Jun 07, 2007

Remember MovableType? OK, OK, I’m joking. I know there are hundreds, or may be thousands of blogs being run on MovableType. I used to manage a few of my blogs with MovableType when it was freely available. I switched to WordPress when MovableType started coming at a price. It’s not that I didn’t want to pay for it. It was just a coincident that I discovered WordPress exactly when I was about to purchase a licensed version of MovableType. There were two things I never liked about MovableType: it was CGI-based; it was very heavy.

WordPress, on the other hand, to my pleasant surprise, turned out to be a PHP-based program, a language I’m comfortable with, and it was not as heavy as MovableType. So why would I pay for a software I didn’t like, especially when a better, free alternative was easily available? Hence the switch.

Along with making MovableType open source, they have also released MovableType Beta 4. You can download Beta 4 and have a look, or if you want, you can also read about Jonathan’s closer look at MovableType Beta 4. The size is still a problem, as Jonathan says:

The first thing I noticed in downloading the beta was file size. It weighed in at a hefty 4MB compared to under 1MB for WordPress and just over 1MB for ExpressionEngine. Even scarier was realizing that there were over 1600 files contained within that compressed file. Suffice it to say, it took awhile to upload to my web server (I should’ve downloaded it directly to the web server!).

About the open source version, the website says:

Why an open source option?
It’s simple: our customers and our community have asked for an open source version of Movable Type. Many customers and developers in the Movable Type community were looking for a version of Movable Type that they were free to modify for their own needs. Additionally, there are community members who are looking to bundle an open source distribution of Movable Type with other open source products. We have been considering this option for some time but decided to base MTOS on the MT4 line, which is why this announcement coincides with MT4.

A good thing about WordPress is that you can change the source according to your personal needs. I have never managed a blog as big as Boingboing but for my size of blogs, I think WordPress is perfect, as long as there is some better alternative.

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