Transitioning to Movable Type 4.2

Movable Type 4.2 was released recently. This blog has been powered by the awesome Movable Type since 2003. [Side note: 2002 was the year of Blogger, and before that I did the site by hand.] Whenever a big new edition of Movable Type is released, I like to update my mostly custom templates with some of the latest technology and features. I spent a few hours this previous weekend doing that, and while I changed a lot, in another sense, not much has changed. I did enable TypePad Antispam, but reCAPTCHA still protects this site. I still don’t allow logins for comments. I try to keep the commenting as simple as possible, and I’ve been very happy with reCAPTCA.

Many of the significant changes surrounding Movable Type’s new version were in the back-end. Rebuild times, for example, have been drastically improved. The main blog here, which I build completely in static HTML pages, had taken 15 or more minutes to rebuild. That number is down to about 4 minutes. That’s a huge improvement in performance.

Some of the noticeable changes to people reading this blog would be the implementation of several microformats, such as hCard and the abbr design pattern. I was already using several microformats such a rel-tag, rel-license and XFN, and these new ones will add additional machine-readable data to the site.

An additional improvement in the new MT is the reduction in the number of templates. I’ve reduced my template modules from 15 down to 7 with the same amount of functionality. The atomic templates Six Apart had gone with in MT 4.0, allowed a lot of flexibility, but in the case of most blogs, that amount of flexibility simply was not needed and ended up being somewhat confusing. At any rate, the new template structure makes a lot of sense, and having all the templates on one page to view is also a nice bonus.

Overall, Movable Type 4.2 is an excellent product. It’s freely available and most people will see that it more than accommodates their needs for blogging or content management.