Movable Type

From Free net encyclopedia

This article is about the weblog software. For information on the printing term, see Printing press.

Movable Type is a widely-used proprietary weblog publishing system developed by California-based Six Apart. One of its most well-known features is TrackBack, which was introduced in version 2.2; it has since been adopted by a variety of other blog systems. Movable Type also supports most popular weblogging features, including user accounts, comments, categories, and themes, and is extensible through a large library of third-party plug-ins. Movable Type is free of charge for a single author; paid licenses, which allow more authors and weblogs on a single installation of the software, are also available. <ref>Movable Type pricing and licenses information</ref> The current version is 3.2. <ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Movable Type is written in Perl, and supports storage of the weblog's content and associated data within MySQL, Berkeley DB, PostgreSQL, and SQLite. The application supports static page generation (in which files for each page are updated whenever the content of the site is changed), dynamic page generation (in which pages are composited from the underlying data as the browser requests them), or a combination of the two technologies.

With the release of version 3.0, there were marked changes in Movable Type's licensing <ref>Template:Cite news</ref>, most notably placing greater restrictions on its use without paying a licensing fee. This sparked criticism from some users of the software, many of whom announced that they would convert their weblog to another package, such as WordPress. With the release of Movable Type 3.2, the ability to create an unlimited number of weblogs at all licensing levels was restored.

Six Apart also maintains two other weblog publishing systems, TypePad and LiveJournal. While Movable Type is a system which needs to be installed on a user's own web server, TypePad is a hosted weblog service. LiveJournal is an entirely separate blogging system, acquired after Six Apart's buyout of Danga Interactive in January 2005.

Movable Type was originally named Serge after musician Serge Gainsbourg.

[edit]