Movable Type (4) is Creeping Up on WordPress

Many of you who have known me are familiar with my love for Movable Type. I've used it since 2.64, which was quite a while ago, eons in terms of internet life...

However, as with every product as it reaches a level of maturity, it began to get a little too comfortable with itself. And like many users, they found themselves tempted by WordPress' interface and usability.

I've resisted installing WordPress for the simple reason that I didn't want to be locked into a PHP environment. Sure, I prefer to use a Windows server (2003 in fact), and most know that PHP has been a brat on that platform up until the IIS team got together with Zend last year to kick in some really nice performance and stability issues.

Still, I, being familiar with classic ASP and learning .NET, didn't want to have to convert anything over to PHP or be locked into a single platform. Movable Type was the only blogging application I could find that could run on any platform that had Perl and could output to literally any language I wanted, from CGI itself to classic ASP, to .NET to even (yes) PHP or ultimately Ruby.

With the latest release of Movable Type 4 (currently in beta), blogging giant Six Apart has taken the few huge advantages WP's interface had and integrated it themselves, but there's still room for improvement.

Enter this post from Byrne on the official Movable Type beta blog, where he explains that Six Apart is committed to listening to its users and shape the upcoming version as much as possible based off of user feedback.

So, as any responsible user wanting to improve the applications they love and use (without writing a plugin, haha), here's my list of suggestions for the MT team regarding the Post/Entry mode (my most frequently used MT page):

• The new WYSIWYG editor is a much needed splash of cool water to the application. The only items that are missing is the ability to change snippets of text into a different formats (such as pre or code or even H2, for example) or even the font color.
• The "Add link/e-mail" function still uses a scripted window, that for many IE users, is blocked unless you activate the functionality from the information bar. This should behave the same as the Image function explained below.
• The "Add image" function uses a Lightbox (cool!) but doesn't let you use a URL and seemingly requires you to upload an image first (boo). It doesn't let you edit those properties after inserting an image either like WP does (double boo). Also, there's no close button if your library is empty or you've never uploaded an image before, but I'd imagine this is just a Beta issue, which makes canceling an image an ordeal currently requiring a refresh of the page to get rid of it.
• The "Display Options" on the right hand side is closed by default and currently leaves for some prime real estate. Additional options (or even the metadata etc.) could be placed here.
• Akismet still isn't integrated as a default option and needs a plugin. Does anyone seriously prefer the alternatives? I understand from Anil that Akismet may be made available with the community plugins package shortly after launch, but having the option internally in MT4 without having to install the plugin separately would be excellent! Seriously, I can't imagine how I dealt with comment spam before Akismet's MT plugin came around.
• More use of Lightboxes would be a perfect way to avoid having to get another page load. But, as with any responsible application, backwards comatability should always fall back to that page load if JavaScript is disabled, for example.
• Spell Check still isn't integrated, aww. Then again, Firefox does have spell check and IE7 has a very nice add-on as well.

There, that wasn't a long list at all!

MT4 has a hell of a lot of potential, and if this is merely a catchup release to WordPress, I think Six Apart has done a fantastic job so far! Only time will tell how this changes the professional (self-hosted) blogging industry, but I have a feeling WordPress may have some trouble with its adoption/usage levels soon.

Keep up the great work MT team!