Movable Type 3.3 Beta 3

Posted by Daniel Stout on Tue 27 Jun 2006 at 9:11 PM

We installed the latest beta of Movable Type 3.3 last week, and it seems to be working good. I had reported a few bugs with beta 2, but they’ve all been fixed in beta 3. Jay Allen reported yesterday that the current build of MT 3.3 is the release candidate, and that things are looking good and stable so they’re foregoing another beta release. Movable Type 3.3 thereby is due soon. We’re looking forward to the release, and we’re glad here at Manufactured Environments that most of the heavy lifting for us is over. Our highly customized templates have been all retrofitted with the latest technology from Six Apart headquarters. That’s one area especially that Movable Type totally blows WordPress out the water. I’m a hands-on person when it comes to websites, and I like to dig in and custom craft my code. ManuEnvi produces always on the level of XHTML 1.0 Strict, completely valid CSS, with valid RSS 2.0 feeds and also a hidden Atom 1.0 feed that I’ve been playing around with. That’s simply something you can’t do in WordPress. If you’ve ever compared the user interfaces between WP and MT, you’ve noticed that Movable Type is much more powerful and a lot more polished. The killer feature that they haven’t baked into WP yet though is being able to handle multiple blogs/authors/etc. You have to install WP multiple times, which would be a headache. We use three separate blogs on ManuEnvi—the front page blog, the photography area, and the podcasts. The one feature that I like in WordPress and Drupal that I wish Movable Type had was easier management of static pages like the About page or the Contact page. I currently use a Dreamweaver template to manage all of those non-blog pages. I simply change the template when I need to and the changes filter down to all the pages. This is okay, but I’d rather do the same process from within Movable Type.

As an aside, this post seems kind of funny to me. I like blogging about blogging software. I’ve used MT since Feb 2003 for ManuEnvi, but I’ve tried others out on the side just to stay current. The thing that seems funny to me about this is that I’ve seen so many beginner blogs that died with the “I updated my blog software” post. I don’t think that happens often with Movable Type blogs because they take more effort, but I see that all the time with WordPress blogs. It seems that when people get to the post where they write about updating the blog software they kind of realize that they have nothing to say. We like to keep things here at ManuEnvi eclectic, so there’s no danger of that. Sometimes we write about technology. Sometimes we write about music. And sometimes we just say thanks for reading.

Tags: drupal · manufactured environments · movable type · mt · mt3.3b3 · wordpress

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