Movable Type becomes Open Source

Today it was announced that the next version of well-known blog authoring tool Movable Type will be available as open source. This may be a good move, since competitors such as WordPress and ExpressionEngine has culled a fair amount of MT users during last years.

The new features of version 4 include a new fresh Ajax interface with Candara, dashboard, GMail-like navigation with keyboard shortcuts, OpenID support, real preview and more. However, it’s still Perl under the hood and the less-than-perfect spam protection has not been improved. While WordPress use JQuery, the MT team has gone down the NIH route and implemented their own Ajax library. And as always, installing MT is not for the faint-hearted.

A beta version is currently available for download. Go ahead and try it, but be careful since it’s only a beta (in the words of Anil Dash, "This is a real-ass beta!"). Don’t use it on production sites. The GPL version of Movable Type 4 is planned for Q3 2007, so stay tuned.