Yes, it does, even though it’s been about a year, it still hurts. The completely different interface. All the new template tags and templates, so many more templates. All those plugins of yesteryear, rendered utterly useless. And the more you customized any of it - ouch - the more you felt the loss. Many bloggers I know that used it either stayed with the version they had or chose to start over with other software instead of upgrading to Movable Type 4. Or if you were like me, you stopped blogging altogether. Playing around with Tumblr and Vox and ranting from time to time on MySpace just wasn’t cuttin’ it anymore, so it’s time to bite the bullet.
From a Free Download to a Sustainable Business (and Codebase)
Six Apart started out very small. You may already know the story of how it began by now: Mena designed a space online and wanted to keep it up to date. Ben made it easier for her. The software he developed for her use grew into Movable Type, which they decided to offer as a free download to anyone with an Internet connection. After that, MT and its userbase grew like wild fire, in many different directions. And so did the business of Six Apart. They eventually decided that, in order to offer a product more feasible for business use, they had to take another look at both the structure of their own business and the structure of the code they created.
Although it is not a hosted service (meaning you download it yourself and install it on your own server), Movable Type was developed to be easy to use and easy to customize. And many of us did just that, taking advantage of its template and plugin architectures to create blogs and sites that sometimes bore no resemblance to anything MT published out of the box. You could trick out either what MT did in your (and your visitors’) browsers by customizing the HTML, style sheets and Javascript of its templates or what MT did on your server by customizing its Perl and PHP scripts. Or you could create your own templates and/or plugins.
Probably to the chagrin of both our hosts and of Six Apart - both of which, on many occasions, hadn’t anticipated that this new and diverse userbase would be in need of so much customer service and/or assistance.
My focus as a developer has always been (and will probably always be) what my visitors experience when they point their browsers to my MT-published site. I know enough about my server to be able to upload files to it and to perform some basic maintenance, but that’s really not my focus. However, that is precisely the focus of developers who either edit MT’s Perl/PHP scripts or roll out their own. As it grew into a product that began to attract corporations (that usually have their own servers) as well as individuals (who often share space on servers with others), that shift also reflected in the central focus of Six Apart’s development of Movable Type.
Simple and Complex, Secure but Open (and Lucrative)
When people visit your site, they are accessing your server. Most of the time that access is as simple as viewing a page or downloading a file. That access is simple (and safe) because your visitor isn’t modifying anything on your server. When someone leaves a comment on your MT-published blog post, that interaction is more complex (and less safe) because it grants more access to your server in order to write information to it. That comment is saved along with the rest of your data and the page that’s being commented on is (usually) modified immediately to reflect the change. Most commenters probably don’t even realize the details of this process - they’re only replying to a blog post they find interesting - but others have far more nefarious purposes. Speaking of nefarious, those of us who’ve been inundated with TrackBack spam have probably thought thrice about even allowing any automatic links back to the original posts. Yes, allowing TrackBacks also allows more access to your server.
From the outside, the structure of sites published with Movable Type hasn’t changed much over the years: basically MT still publishes a home page for (and an RSS feed of) your most recent blog posts, a page for each blog post and a series of archive pages - all (usually) linked to one another. Most of Movable Type 4’s maturation happened at the server level. There has also been significant development of the HTML/CSS/Javascript that make up those individual pages, but not nearly as significant (or as extreme) as the software development that made Movable Type 4 almost completely incompatible with its previous versions. This set of revisions also made Movable Type a more practical solution for larger businesses - or any group with more than one user.
Meanwhile, other sites like Yahoo!, Google, Amazon and Flickr were developing APIs that promised access to information on their servers while maximizing the security of their own users. Developers who made Movable Type plugins that interfaced with other sites began to see a market and wanted to be paid accordingly for their work - especially since Movable Type itself was growing into a product that Six Apart began to sell, in addition to more customer support for it.
When Free Isn’t Quite That Free
The great thing about MT 2 and 3 was, even though it took some doing, they were quite compatible. Many users who designed blogs (and entire sites) with MT 2 upgraded to MT 3 and (mostly) everything still worked. MT 4’s new structure either couldn’t (or wouldn’t) accommodate the majority of the simpler templates and plugins of the older versions, sacrificing compatibility and offering instead a new dashboard, an increased focus on widgets (which atomized many components of each page - especially its sidebar - into cleaner fragments of portable code) and many other features all made possible by a more powerful engine.
The evolution of Movable Type is probably a bit more complicated than the reasons I’ve mentioned. Even so, I think Six Apart faced the development of their embryonic product, their support of that product and their business as gracefully as they could. I don’t know how they could have grown any of those elements of itself without also considering how they would have to pay for that growth. Presenting Movable Type as both an enterprise-level product and as an open-source project emphasizes Six Apart’s integrity and their belief in the community of the Internet. Still, I wonder who will invest the same time and energy that they did before - especially with more versions on the way …
What Now?
As you can see, I’ve upgraded this blog to the latest version of Movable Type. I personally plan to dig deep into it (my own theme is in the works), even though I’d hesitate before recommending it. I’m probably not going to design anyone else’s site with it (though a PDF of the Template Tag Reference would be lovely), at least for the time being, but Movable Type is definitely what I plan to use to develop my own blogs and sites for the foreseeable future. I’m willing to stick around to find out where this goes.
Leave a comment