SixApart (the company behind Movable Type) has announced a new product that extends MT4 called Movable Type Community Solution.
This new product looks like it takes MT into a social networking kind of direction and incorporates a long list of features including:
- Member Profiles: Registered members of your community can create and customize profiles
- Avatars or User Pictures: Members can upload an image of themselves to identify themselves on their comments, posts and profile
- Favoriting, Recommendations and User Voting: Your community can vote for its favorite content, making it easy for your readers and authors to see what’s most popular
- User-Contributed Content: Registered users can submit content to your site, and administrators have full control over what gets published
- Community Blogs: Exclusive new community blogs designed to allow any site visitor to become a contributor to your blog
- Forums: Powerful but simple full-featured forums completely integrated with your blogs, user profiles, and content management
- Comment Feeds: Automatic comments feeds for your site and for each topic, blog post and/or profile.
MT community solution is not a service that is readily available to everyone – in fact to find out the price of it you need to email them for a quote.
It’ll be interesting to see where this all goes and to see how and if the team at WordPress responds.
I’m still relatively new to WordPress (and blogging in general), but would I be correct in stating that this could be similar to essentially integrating a lot of features available through plugins into the core product?
Not that that is necessarily a bad thing, as I’m still working on trying to figure out all the requirements for Gravatar integration (though in all fairness, I’ve been more focused on writing than backend work).
I guess my other thought is this product is most likely to interest larger bloggers who are interested in these features, but aren’t part of a larger network who would have a technical staff. Too small and I don’t know if people would be willing to pay, and much larger and people might have already found a way to get everything they want.
Now, if WordPress comes out with some more integration along these lines for free . . .
WordPress + Vanilla == MT4CS
I just commented in my presentation at BlogWorld that there needs to be more social functionality for blogs, something like a forum mixed with a blog.
If I wasn’t so entrenched with WordPress, I would jump on this in a heartbeat. I have a couple of projects that have stayed on the backburner for far too long because I needed a solution just like what MT has done here.
I wish there was a way to test it out with my community before paying anything. I like the direction they are headed with this, and imho, WP should have done it long ago!
I agree with what Adam has to say. It seems like they are trying to integrate all the plugins and make one broader aspect of a service. Also I think the fact that you have to pay for the service might have a lot of blogger put it into the back burner as I certainly wouldn’t pay for this.
Besides, if you have to email them to get a quote I wouldn’t be surprised if the price is a little too high. When there are other sites and discussion groups all over the internet that allows you to show your profile and market your blog, what exactly is the point of this.
I am not sure if I am getting it, but is it targeted towards movable type community only? And if it is, wouldn’t those members want a service for free for a change as personally, I think they are stepping into a market where these kind of services are offered for free for the users. My thoughts!!
I really like the idea of member profile pages and a community blogging feature. The readers would definitely feel more connected with the blogger and each other if they had a hand in more than just comments.
I used to own a forum, but no longer do. (was too much maintenance for only me)
I’m sure that the “Bigger” bloggers might be interested in these products, but for me, I can wait.
Also like you said, It would be interesting to see what wordpress does in response. There would have to be something absolutely amazing to come out for me to move away from wordpress. because its simple, looks nice, and you can do alot with it.
Good post Darren, thanx.
Worknplay> I know what you mean about having to email for a price quote. Reminds me of the adage, if you have to ask, you probably can’t afford it. Now, I don’t know what their pricing is like, but even the fact that it brings that thought to peoples’ minds can be a put-off
Thank you so much for the heads up!
I’m in the process of launching something, and that MT Community Solution will (I think) work perfectly!!!
Thanks!!!
Looks promising. Wouldn’t work as well if it was free. If it was free like blogger then had a subscription that gives you more options i think it would do better. I would only get it if i was making a site on a topic with lots of opinions and arguements. Thanks Darren for all you do.
Not understanding much when I got started (and still not much more now) I wound up picking Movable Type for my blog through the Yahoo hosting plan.
I wish I had more flexibility with MT and maybe this will finally give me more freedom to expand my ideas. It’s free for me to use now so I wonder if I’m going to get an upgrade price or ?
I think this is a great move for content management in general. I’d love to see WordPress make similar enhancements to their software. As much as I love the blog platform, I would like to eventually expand my blog to become a fully operational web site with a forum and some other features very much like the ones MT has instituted.
I just wonder why the price is such a big secret.
-Melissa Donovan
Writing for Writers
Hello, Movable type is very expansive if you want to “build” a big community.
I tried a lot of blogging platform (WordPress MU – not really ready-, B2evolution, Dotclear2, Lifetype, Nucleus, Expression Engine, Blog système, Bloghoster, Drupal….), some of them are very expansive, others are not easy to understand and finally, I don’t find a good open source blogging platform for create my community. Do you know some others? Thank you
Looking forward for more informations about movable type.
Well in fact it’s free for personal use. For those more concerned about starting a site up with some members and search engine traffic, this is a great free start. If you’re site actually is picking up some steam, then go ahead and upgrade to allow for monetization. Still, not a bad gift from MT – and a challenge to WordPress, especially MU.