MTOS 4.1 - Movabletype Open Source

Posted on January 28, 2008
Filed Under Web Publishing |

At the moment, there seems to be an embarrassment of riches as far as Open Source software releases go.

A few days ago, unnoticed by me at least, despite the fact that I had been checking on their site regularly, the chaps at movabletype.org (the open source division of Six Apart) made available the stable release of MTOS - Movable Type Open Source - 4.1.

We have also seen the long-awaited release of Joomla! 1.5 and it will probably not be too long before we see Drupal 6.0 available for download. WordPress 2.5 is not planned for release until March 2008.

MTOS is slightly different from the others in that it has hitherto been available either for a fee for commercial use or free for personal use: there have been restrictions on what you could do with it. There is still paid for commercial support and some extras are not free, but the central code is now available to do what you want with, under an open source licence.

To quote their own blurb:

The Movable Type Open Source Project is a community effort, led by Six Apart, devoted to creating an open source version of Movable Type, the award winning, ground breaking and revolutionary blogging platform. This open source version (or MTOS for short) will be free for anyone to modify, redistribute and use for any purpose that they choose. The Movable Type Open Source Project is more then just a piece of software however.

  • MTOS is an entire community of people devoted to making Movable Type better.
  • MTOS is a set of projects, including a full version of the core platform, designed to innovate upon how the world publishes online.
  • MTOS is a distribution of the core publishing platform licensed under an open source license.

The other major difference is that it uses cgi-perl scripts, so the installation is slightly different from what you may be used to with many LAMP CMS and blog software and you may be less happy to start editing code, but that obviously depends upon your skill level in Perl.

The main point in this regard is that you really need to decide what type of person you are when installing any software. To make a comparison with driving a car, are you someone who just gets in and expects it to go and takes it to the garage when it doesn’t; do you tinker with it on weekends and then have to get a friend to fix it when you break something; or do you regularly take the engine apart and uprate the suspension?

Most people probably fall within the ‘hope for the best and panic when things go wrong’ category.

MTOS probably compares most accurately with WordPress Mu in that it supports unlimited bloggers and blogs and allows you to create directories for your posted or paged content. This is not quite like installs of normal WordPress or Drupal or Joomla! in the sense that they occupy a directory, from which you can create sub-directories.

If you start looking at plugins, you may also see a difference compared with WordPress or Drupal, but a similarity with Joomla! in that many of them are commercial. As the MTOS community grows, it will remain to be seen whether there is a preponderance of people giving their efforts away free or if commercialism will predominate.

So, is it worth looking at? Absolutely!

There have been adverse comments about MTOS for what could be called political or cultural reasons, regarding the historical Movable Type licencing and strong loyalty to other systems, but if you are not blinded by any of this, MTOS is worth installing and playing with at least.

The only problem is that there is now almost too much choice. You really need to look at tools for jobs and the probable need for having several, rather than hoping that one will cover all your needs. In this regard, PrefPass may help your users to log in to different systems without feeling that it becomes just too much hassle to be bothered.

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