Continuing the beta test of Movable Type 4.0

Posted by Daniel Stout on Thu 19 Jul 2007 at 7:33 AM

Six Apart has been dutifully releasing a new beta each week of Movable Type 4.0. This weeks venture is beta 7. Since the release of beta 1 in early June, I’ve been dutifully installing each new beta, reporting errors, and generally kicking the tires, so to speak. When beta 2 came out, I figured that there would probably be around eight beta releases. With the release of beta 7, I don’t think I’ll be far off in that estimation. Beta 7 seems to be showing the spit and polish of a mature release.

I was interested to see that they’ve finally baked in some podcasting features into the application. Beta 1 broke Brandon Fuller’s MT-Enclosures that I had been using to produce enclosure tags in the RSS feed. But perhaps some of these new templates tags will take care of all of that.

The one hard part of going through the beta is that there have been a lot of new features added, but documentation is in short supply at this point. I’m sure they’re working on it for release with the general release, but I’m still feeling like I haven’t quite taken advantage of what’s all new in Movable Type simply because I haven’t been able to read up on it. For example, they announced the new podcasting features in beta 7, but so far they haven’t actually said what they are. What new template tags support podcasting? Who knows? Maybe I’m impatient, but it seems that a little more time spent documenting some of the new features would have been helpful.

At any rate, Movable Type 4.0 is a much needed improvement on an already great product. I say much-needed because the basic application hadn’t really changed much – but MT 4.0 is a complete modernization of the product. Blogging has changed since I first started using Movable Type in Feb 2003, and now Movable Type has changed with it. Movable Type is still the best of the best.

Tags: beta 7 · movable type · mt4.0b7

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