Movable Type: Powerful enterprise blogs

Six Apart’s Movable Type arguably put blogs on the map. The current 3.15 maintenance release shows that Six Apart continues to dedicate itself to giving organizations a respectable publishing platform for Weblogs.

Movable Type runs on Linux, most flavors of Unix (including Mac OS X), and Windows Server. It’s more difficult to install than TWiki, partly due to Movable Type’s mediocre documentation and spotty online help. On the flip side, Movable Type’s tag language isn’t hard to learn and generates XHTML/CSS-compliant output, including support for Unicode and international character sets.

The commercial version I tested easily handled multiple blogs, an important point for enterprises with many teams. Beginning with Version 3.1, administrators can select static or dynamic publishing for each template. For instance, index pages might be static for faster speed, whereas less-accessed archives are generated dynamically.

The blog’s basic premise is usability, and Movable Type doesn’t fail there. It’s easy to enter and format information using the supplied rich-text editor. Alternately, contributors can post plain text using a pop-up form. Another form allows visitors to e-mail entries to co-workers. I easily maintained a list of users to notify when posting a new entry. What’s more, the well-done user interface allowed me to create subcategories, and I had no trouble assigning posts to one or more categories.

This application’s scheduled publishing function proved very useful on an intranet, allowing me to specify the exact time a news posting was to appear. I also published multiple versions of my site in XML, RSS, and the Atom syndication format.

Because of Movable Type’s popularity, free or low-cost plug-ins for automating functions are available, although they don’t give you the forms and database handling provided by wikis. Overall, Moveable Type delivers a solid blogging experience.

Movable Type 3.15 sixapart.com Cost: 50 users, $1,299.95