Movable Type 3.0 preview

Ben Trott has music for my ears. For the benefit of those who aren’t on the Movable Type mailing list:

The next version of Movable Type will be version 3.0, a significant and free upgrade. Many oft-requested features will be integrated into this release, including:

• Comment registration. As a response to both comment spam and to the increased usage of Movable Type on large community sites, we’ll be adding the option to restrict comments to registered users.
• Improved comment and TrackBack management features.
• New API hooks for plugin developers. Plugins will now be able to hook into many more pieces of Movable Type, including adding callbacks for saving and removing objects, building application methods with integration into the UI, and hooking into the publishing process. This opens up possibilities for plugins to add even more advanced functionality than they’re able to do now.
• User interface rebuilt using CSS. We’ve seen with TypePad that a CSS-based interface gives users very fast application response times, and gives us a flexible interface for making application-wide changes, and we want to give this same speed and flexibility to Movable Type users.
• Support for the Atom API. We’ve already added Atom syndication feed support in version 2.65 of Movable Type, and we’ll be adding publishing support for the API in 3.0.

In addition to the above, we’ll be integrating some features into 3.0 that we’re not yet ready to announce, but which we know will be very exciting to MT users. Additionally, for those interested in posting from mobile devices, we expect this to be a welcome release.

Movable Type 3.0 will be a free download and upgrade. We have full-time engineering resources devoted to this new version, and we plan to have a beta release in Q1 of 2004.