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Movable Type Beta

Six Apart, makers of Movable Type, have released a beta version of their new blogging software, MT Version 3.2. I installed the beta version on another blog, and here are some thoughts.

So far, I like it. Managing blogs, entries and users is all more intuituve than they have been in previous versions. I especially like the junk comments features - it makes weeding out spam comments much easier then using MT-Blacklist.

I also like the cosmetic changes of 3.2. Icons are small, colorful and easy to manage. There's nice use of Javascript on pages like the user administration area so you don't need to go to another screen to assign a user to a blog.

Installation was a snap, and I was up and running very quickly. The only issue I had was with FTP'ing the contents to the server, I think I didn't have ASCII set for the transfer, I think Fetch was set to auto. I logged in via ssh, curl'ed the file and unpacked it right there and everything was fine out of the box, permissions and all.

Importing old entries was very fast and easy, much faster then other versions of MT.

The only issue I'm having is at login. The mt.cgi file comes up very fast but once you enter your username and password and press login, it just spins and spins for several minutes before letting me in. Once I get in, everything seems to be very fast, except when going back to mt.cgi. I may grab one of the nightly builds and see if that corrects the issue. This is beta software after all.

Overall, I think this bodes very well for the future of Movable Type. It keeps getting better and better and I think 3.2 is going to be a nice upgrade for bloggers.