Ubiquitous blogging platform Movable Type launches the beta of version 4 today, with a new architecture, a slew of Web 2.0-ish features, and the stated intention of standing in as a full-blown (if lightweight) content management system.(Full disclosure: InfoWorld is a customer of Six Apart, Movable Type’s parent company. I am writing this posting in Movable Type, an oddly reflexive exercise.)Concurrent with the beta, the company announced the Movable Type Open Source Project, an open source version of MT due in Q3. Six Apart is already an open source proponent, having contributed OpenID and other OSS in the past, so this piece of news is welcome but not surprising. But back to Movable Type 4: It’s wildly ambitious. Not content with being the social software of choice for everything from one-man megaphones to major corporate sites, it now wants to function as a content management system (CMS) for whole Web sites. Two years ago, this would have been laughable. Today, it may not be. Blogs are at the center of many major sites, and a basic template approach to everyday Web pages (not just ones we think of as blogs) is viable. That assumes, of course, that MT 4 is still a competent blogging platform — a reasonable assumption, given the quality of both the current MT3 and MT Enterprise edition 1.5. InfoWorld will put the beta through its paces over the next several weeks, though we’ll be doing so gingerly. “This is a real beta, not a Google-style beta,” according to Six Apart EVP Chris Alden; in other words, beta testers should not think about running MT 4 in a production environment. The dev team’s most far-reaching decision is the introduction of a “plug-in” architecture. The new base platform rolls up the code base of MT 3, MT Enterprise 1.5, community-contributed enhancements, plus some core technologies from hosted blogging platform TypePad and consumer lines Vox and LiveJournal (all part of the Six Apart family). Feature packs will sit on top of MT for specialized functions and community-based add-ons, ideally avoiding code bloat of the base platform. The architectural change is intended to make MT more flexible and scalable, a primary development goal of the new release.The laundry list of new features is long and needed: installation Wizard, new UI, system dashboards, better image insert feature (yes!), redesigned template management tools and WYSIWYG editor, and so on. Even more significant, assuming they work, will be community-management tools for managing readers’ comments. Readers who wish to respond to a blog will be able to join the Web site’s community (through MT tools) and post their own photos, videos, audio, as well as text. Exciting stuff. Still, I don’t foresee many large, complex sites dumping their industrial-strength CMSes anytime soon, no matter how solid the new MT may turn out to be. The fact that it’s even a consideration, though, proves how far blogging software has come. Technology Industry