MovableType 4 Finally Out

I know for most of my readers who only care about information on Shanghai will find this news boring or irrelevant to the topic of this blog. Maybe it is, but for me, it is completely not.

There are several reasons.

1. Thank you, MovableType.

I’d like to thank MovableType for providing such a good tool for me to use in the last 5 years. I am, maybe, one of the most loyal usres of MovableType, from the day one (or the second in terms of MovableType’s history) to today.

MovableType was a great software, and I love the company a lot. I also enjoy my personal friendship with people in MovableType, like Ginger, or Chris, and the two founders, Mena and Ben (for meeting for a short period of time, but gave me very unique impression).

2. Think of my first entry in this blog in Sept of 2002.

It is: MovableType Successfully Installed on Windows XP. If I wasn’t attracted by the Shanghai Pudong Airport topic, MAYBE, this blog may turn out to be a MovableType blog.

3. Movable 4 has great features I was looking for.

Let me quote some I am interested most among the many features MovableType 4 offers.

Features I like

10. A powerful and simple re-sizable WYSIWYG Editor, with automatic saving of drafts of entries and templates — never lose a half-written post again

The auto save works great for me, although I wonder whether I will get used to the WYSIWYG Editor, since I have been using the plain text for five years – it worked perfectly well for me.

16. Better plain-text entry with built-in support for Markdown and Textile, and conversion of MS Word “smart” quotes to HTML entities

The smart quote feature is sometimes useful when I write in Word first.

17. Even more SEO-friendly with customizable URLs per entry, per-template, or per-page

Good feature, however, I don’t think there is any chance for me to customize my old URLs.

20. OpenID support built in

This is great. I will support OpenID! My OpenID is wangjianshuo.com. Yes. Just Wangjianshuo.com, so register your openId and you will be able to directly sign-in in the new version of Wangjianshuo.com

21. Built-in user registration

This is the best feature. When Wangjianshuo’s blog has registration feature, do you want to be the first to register?

22. Powerful profile pages for every user in your system

Yes! This is it! I love this feature so much so my contributors (commenters) has a place to show off their great contribution to the site – this blog is nothing without the in-depths comments.

24. A ratings framework that lets users rate any item in the system — entries, comments, and in the future even authors or entire blogs

To ask my readers to rate the best blog entries of the month is a very cool idea. So give me feedback by rating and you can also the great comment you see.

27. Automatically provision a new blog for each user who registers with the system

Wow! Can it be possible? Hmmm.. Let me think the question: what if you want to open a blog under the domain of Wangjianshuo.com? Do you want to do that?

28. Built-in support for integrated spam fighting and optionally displaying a CAPTCHA for comments

I hope the anti-spam is better (although it is good enough) and I won’t turn on the CAPTCHA feature, since I think my additional work to delete spam comments is well compensated by easier comments without entering the hard to read characters.

29. Integrated email notifications — let your readers know when a thread they’re interested in has updated

This is also great. I have this plugin installed, but it does not seem to work.

Well. That’s it. It has great features, and I am looking forward to upgrade this blog to MovableType 4.0 this weekend. I hope I have enough time to do that.

Congratulations, the MovableType team!

4 thoughts on “MovableType 4 Finally Out

  1. jianshuo:

    Did you know that WordPress has already offering all those options for a quiet a while now. did you ever consider to look into wp?

  2. I know. However, I am pretty confident in the ability of MovableType and have deep connection with them from bottom of my heart. So I will keep with MovableType as long as it keeps improving. It is just for the person you love. You know there are many people out there who are better in certain areas, but the time two persons get along won’t change.

    The bottom line is, a blog is all about the content, and the community, not the blogging software. So I will keep with MovableType.

  3. i am new in moveable type , i want to the following

    can you help me to sove these

    user registration

    two-level commenting

    site wide search

    email an entry to a friend

    sign up for email updates

    all the above i want to implement in the movable type

  4. @sudhakar, I believe in MovableType 4.04, they have all these features out-of-box. (I don’t know what two-level commenting is). Please check documentation of MovableType.

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