Movable Type has just announced their new upgrade 4.2 - and a new product called Movable Type Pro. According to the release, the new "Pro" version has custom fields that owners can now use to add new attributes to their content - thus boosting the more generalized content management aspects of the software.
In addition, and probably much more importantly, they've added Social Networking into the product, so that people can "participate in forums, recommend stories and vote for stories".
Sounds like an incredibly cool new set of features for an already well thought out blogging tool. (Full Disclosure: this blog is on Typepad, the SaaS version of Movable Type).
Additionally, Chris Alden, Six Apart's CEO says ""The readers … can establish their own profiles and can ask questions, participate in forums, recommend stories and vote for stories".
But then Ed Anuff, general manager of Six Apart's Movable Type division says:
"The type of Web site that you build with Movable Type doesn't have to look like a classic two- or three-column blog," he added. "It can be structured to look like any Web site you see surfing the Web. Web publishing is moving from a heavily process-driven activity to being something more decentralized, something more inclusive of community, and being able to build Web sites in a more rapid and agile fashion. We really view Movable Type as part of sea change in Web content management toward a social publishing direction."
While I don't entirely disagree - I think I'd parse the words a bit differently. While I think it's an interesting new set of product features, moving web content management toward a social publishing direction is an incredibly cool feature for a very specific type of web site.
I do agree that web sites are generally moving in a direction where they are more decentralized, and need to be built in a more rapid and agile fashion - and we'll see if I can really do that with this new version (just downloaded the trial).
Rather, this release seems to me to be just part of the real sea change and more general trend that we're seeing where specific vertical or horizontally focused frameworks of web sites, rather than those created/designed from "scratch" are helping organizations launch new web sites quickly and efficiently. So, yes, this framework (a social media directed framework) is part of that overall trend. But that's just it. A small part of a larger trend. Social media web sites are just one piece of that trend.
I'm using Movable Type Open Source version 4.1 and I don't even have the directory
lib/MT/App/
I'm looking for the Search.pm file and I can't find that either
Posted by: sayen | January 22, 2009 at 10:52 PM