MovableType 3.0 Released To Less Than Impressed Punters

The new version of MovableType has been released to a less than enthusiastic response from current users — me included. Fair enough that they should be paid for their efforts, but they need to put some long hard thought into their pricing scheme.

The free version can’t be used on this site in its current form, so Six Apart’s commitment to a free version is going to be laughable to a large number of users. Even the paid versions are restricted to a set number of blogs and authors have already freaked out a sizeable portion of the community.

By adding these silly restriction to the commercial versions, they’re locking out small to medium companies who are looking for a CMS. Sure 20 authors may sound like a lot when you only have five employees, but considering the high staff turnover of some places I’ve worked, those author allocations will be used within the year.

Six Apart have termed the restrictions; Generous limits on weblogs and authors. Apparently they have a different definition of generous than I do. Why on earth they didn’t give the upper end versions unlimited blogs and authors is beyond me.

I also have my doubts about the new versions comment spam filtering abilities. So far it only appears to be working because the software has been in beta. Give it a month in the real world and it will be back to the usual flood of crap as the spammers circumvent the security. It doesn’t help that the new version doesn’t support the plugins that were developed for the previous versions. A serious oversight when you rely on MT-Blacklist to kill frequent comment spamming attacks.

And so far, the new features are nothing to write home about. In fact, they’re almost non-existent. Sure, better comment control is nice, but some functionality like the long promised sub-categories wouldn’t have gone astray either. There are no features that don’t already exist as hacks, work-arounds or plugins.

If you want people to part with cash for something they currently use gratis, then adding shiny things to entice their inner geek is a great way to do it. Six Apart seem to have forgotten this.

Feòrag has already mentioned migrating the Pagan Prattle over to WordPress when the Prattle gets a shiny new server.

WordPress only seems to have one drawback — it’s a PHP application — but it would give me the excuse to dabble with a new toy. It has some nice features, like the afore-mentioned sub-categories.

Scriptygoddess also mentions the lack of features and suggests Drupal as another MovableType alternative.

I can’t see the site moving to MT 3.0 any time soon under the current ridiculous licensing system. If I need to upgrade, well, WordPress is looking pretty good.

However, due to the nature of MT-Blacklist — it replaces MT code, rather than working with it — its current incarnation, 1.63, will not work with the new version. It may even kill the database. Having done that once, I have no desire to do it again.

Jay Allen has hinted at an even more amazing version of MT-Blacklist to come, which means that I’ll probably hold off any changes of platform until MT3 leaves the developer version and goes into general release.