Movable Type 4.2 is here!

Today is one of the most exciting days in the history of Movable Type. Our community's hard work has yielded one of the most significant and important releases in Movable Type's history: Movable Type 4.2. This new release is the fastest and most secure release of Movable Type ever. Plus it comes packed with new features that you've been asking for:

• Threaded comments
• An out-of-the-box solution for comment spam
• Live template previews
• Paginated search results and entry pagination for dynamically published blogs
• Redesigned template and widget management areas
• Simple, simple, simple templates for quick and easy site customization

However, there is another reason though why we feel this is such a significant milestone for Movable Type and for all of us who manage communities online: Today, we introduce Movable Type Pro.

Movable Type Pro is the convergence of three critical Movable Type capabilities: blogging, content management and social networking. Movable Type Pro is now the only integrated social publishing platform on the market today. MT Pro combines the power and flexibility of the open source core Movable Type with the rich content management capabilities of the Movable Type Professional Pack, and all the community features of the Movable Type Community Solution. Then, working closely with our community we have also refined our licenses and pricing to make these features and capabilities available to more people then ever before for the very reasonable price of free.

Starting today the Movable Type Pro Blogger License is available for free to anyone and everyone not running an official business. With this license, users can have:

• unlimited blogs
• unlimited authors
• unlimited community members
• unlimited everything

That's right, the Blogger license does not impose any caps upon its use and is free of the greatest barrier of all: cost.

Finally, where our personal and commercial licenses were sometimes unclear in this respect, the Blogger License allows you to make money and thrive. Frankly, we know that people get their start using free tools and then start businesses and grow their sites based on that foundation. So, once you're ready to set up shop as a business around your blog, we know you'll want to step up to a commercial license to get full support and access to the phenomenal team we've assembled at Six Apart Services.

But that is, as we say around here, all part of the "dot com" side of Movable Type. Movable Type 4.2 is also a great release for developers and users of the open source version of Movable Type. Here are some of the great new features developers will love:

• Pluggable Search Backend - we have worked hard to make Movable Type's search infrastructure faster, but we realize that some may want to swap it out with a home grown or more powerful search engine. MT 4.2 makes that possible.
• Extensible Search - by default Movable Type searches page and entries, but some users may want assets, comments, TrackBacks, users, or their own custom data types to appear in search results. MT 4.2 makes that possible through very simple, YAML-based plugins.
• OpenID 2.0 Support - Movable Type now fully supports OpenID 2.0, being among the only to support it right out of the box.
• Bundled OAuth Libraries - we recognize that open standards like OpenID and OAuth will become the underpinnings of technologies to comes, which is why we have bundled OAuth libraries into the core of Movable Type to make building plugins and applications that rely upon these technologies easier.
• Fully documented core template tags - a little overdue, we will be the first to admit, but all of the core template tags have been fully documented.
• Performance optimization tools - our performance logging framework can be used by developers to hone in on parts of their code that can be optimized.

But if you are a developer or a blogger, a professional or an enterprise, there is no better time than now to run your site on the same platform that powers some of the leading web sites and brands today, like AMC, Talking Points Memo, Kenneth Cole, the Washington Post and O'Reilly Radar. Download the open source version of Movable Type today, or head on over to the newly redesigned MovableType.com web site to download or get Movable Type Pro.

Upgrading to Movable Type 4.2

To help users upgrade we have assembled a great deal of documentation to assist in the process with our Movable Type 4.2 Upgrade Guide. Then once, you have the software installed and Movable Type has upgraded itself, documentation is available to help you update your web site to take advantage of Movable Type Pro's Community features, and to help everyone optimize the performance of their web site.