Six Apart: Movable Type is now free (Again!)

Posted by Daniel Stout on Fri 4 Aug 2006 at 8:00 PM

Anil Dash posted some big news on the Six Apart corporate blog today: Movable Type is now free for personal bloggers. That’s awesome news of course and hopefully will spur more people to try out Movable Type. Six Apart has decided that corporate bloggers are where the money is at for blogging tools and released an enterprise version of Movable Type. If the success of WordPress is any indication, personal bloggers don’t eff’ing want to pay for blogging tools. For our money, Movable Type is still the best blogging software out there.

Movable Type was free once upon a time, and free it is again. For personal users, you can have unlimited numbers of blogs in your install and an unlimited number of authors. This is such great news. To be honest, I hope it’s not too late. A lot of Movable Type’s thunder has been stolen by WordPress since they started charging with version 3.0. Movable Type has beefier web host requirements, but to Six Apart’s credit, they’ve simplified the install process quite a bit, which will help win over users.

The prior version 3.2 was a huge upgrade and should have been called 4.0. This new update called 3.3 is more of an incremental upgrade, but it’s got some great stuff in there, especially for the lighter, less technical blogger. I still love being able to hand code my own templates, and I will probably keep doing that for as long as I care to. But now people using Movable Type have the option of using the StyleCatcher, which works like Themes in WordPress. You can grab a bunch of templates that have been packaged together, drop them in, and your blog is automagically styled.

Go download it now and try it out! If you want support, you can pay $50/year to get unlimited professional support. If you have questions about whether you qualify as a personal blogger, check out the frequently asked questions.

Tags: free · movable type · six apart · stylecatcher · wordpress

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