Moveable Type blog tool to get a face lift

At the conference for business blogging attendees got an early look at a tool designed to help their businesses better manage blogs.

Six Apart’s Anil Dash gave a preview of the new Moveable Type Version 3.2 Weblog publishing platform on Friday here at the Blog Business Summit in San Francisco.

According to Dash’s stats, Six Apart’s platform powers more than 10 million blogs around the world.

The new version of the platform coming out next week will include more features for administration, ease of use, and community management.

Version 3.2 will include a new section of the application that provides a system overview, Dash said. This is designed to help administration of multiple blogs.

“It lets you view all the information in the system no matter where you published it,” he said. “Everything is in one place.”

The system overview link shows every blog post title, which Weblog it was posted on, and time of post.

Comments and trackback improvements were also added in Movable Type 3.2.

The publishing tool will automatically filter comment or trackback spam and delete spam after a set period of time. The announcement of this feature drew a few shouts of appreciation from the crowd.

Older blogging tools had a problem with what Dash calls “silent data loss.” This is when valuable trackbacks and comments were mistakenly filtered as junk.

“In the old days silent data loss was a big management burden; you had no way to know who’s building your community,” he said.

The new version also lets users retrieve false positives from the junk folder.

The context sensitive search feature knows where you are in the application and lets you search for and replace any item across all your blogs.

For example, in one step you can update the look and feel across all your blogs.

Another cool feature is that the user manual is a living document that allows comments from bloggers, which are subsequently reviewed and used to help improve the document.