Movable Type To Open Up

Six Apart has taken the opportunity of Movable Type’s 4.0 beta release to announce that it is now an open source project. Movable Type is one of the leading blogging engines. In fact it was the only popular one some years back, until Wordpress came along. Both used the same technology (PHP), in the same domain (blogging), both looked at making the life easier for the user (blogger) and both were quite comparable. What was the difference? Open source! Wordpress could overtake because it was and is open source, and frankly I think Six Apart has realized this a bit too late.

Wordpress has the philosophy of keeping it simple, and it being open source has helped it extend this to developers too. The community has developed scores of plugins and themes only because they could look under the hood and contribute their code. Not only has this led to extending Wordpress, but even improving it in many cases. A classic open source success!

I think it might be too late because the open source blogging scene is already crowded. Apart from Wordpress, people have used Drupal and Joomla for blogging. Other tools like Habari and Serendipity are picking up. You will find many more open source tools if you shuffle the technologies a bit to Python, Ruby or Perl. Wordpress too had entered a crowded blogging scene, but its openness has propelled it to a favorite in the users.

Even the other users- the developers are picking up RAD frameworks like Symfony, Ruby On Rails or Django to create just-more-than-blogs.

Of course Movable Type has its benefits, and I personally think that it has high quality design and code. But nowadays it is easier for people to improve open source tools rather than switching them. Movable Type 4.0 promises many enhancements and features and being open sourced it can a very good tool to use. It will be able to retain its current users and maybe get popular in developing dynamic web sites as a CMS. But it will have to do something more to gain back the lost user base.