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Turning Readers into Members and Audiences into Communities

By Byrne Reese
Posted June 22, 2007.

As bloggers and blogging in general have been maturing we have been witnessing a shift in the types of things people expect and need in their tool-set. That is why an important part of this release has been building a platform that helps bloggers and site owners to manage and promote a more active and engaged audience and community.

In our ongoing series of "What's New in Movable Type 4" we showcase the next set of features that help people build real community sites.

  1. OpenID support built in
  2. Built-in user registration
  3. Powerful profile pages for every user in your system
  4. Customizable roles and even more granular user permissions let you control exactly what users can access
  5. A ratings framework that lets users rate any item in the system -- entries, comments, and in the future even authors or entire blogs
  6. Easily reply to comments from right within the administration UI
  7. Built in per-author archives let your readers connect with the people who publish the site
  8. Automatically provision a new blog for each user who registers with the system
  9. Built-in support for integrated spam fighting and optionally displaying a CAPTCHA for comments
  10. Integrated email notifications -- let your readers know when a thread they're interested in has updated
Back

11 Comments

metisinternet

metisinternet on June 24, 2007, 10:50 p.m. Reply

The built in rating system is something very exciting that I have been looking forward to for a couple of years. All of these features listed make it easier to create and manage blogs, but the rating system really impacts on stickiness and user engagement. Just hope that the UI continues to improve.

Mimi Campbell

Mimi Campbell on July 19, 2012, 10:50 p.m. Reply

Well, this options for creating the readers into members are really beautiful, but this is the most difficult part. It is connected with the topic and the writing skills of the author. It is really hard, I think.

Harry Cohen

Harry Cohen on August 1, 2012, 6:50 a.m. Reply

The most important thing is to be a good and interesting writer. If you are it will be much easier.

Joe Forener

Joe Forener on August 30, 2012, 3:51 a.m. Reply

The 29th option is really cool. There are some options like an e-mail to the commenter when you have new content. It brings the reader back to the site.

Ashley Morgan

Ashley Morgan on September 11, 2012, 10:55 p.m. Reply

You addons are great, but I believe something is missing here. You have to give an option to the readers to give easely content to the blog and the site. By doing this you will have a real option for building a community around the site.

Martha Johnson

Martha Johnson on October 3, 2012, 5:37 a.m. Reply

Is the ratings framework shown in Google results. I’ve seen something like five stars on Google results which shown how good is an article or entire site. It is something like that?

Valary McIngton

Valary McIngton on November 5, 2012, 2:46 a.m. Reply

This feature with ratings on different part of the blog and especially the authors is really interesting. It gives new options for the readers which will help to the communication between the author and readers and will make the latter more connected with the site. I like it very much.

Aaron Holt

Aaron Holt on November 8, 2012, 6:03 a.m. Reply

Integrated email notifications is really important. I know it could be easily considered as spam, but it can inform user for new articles. By that it brings the new visits of loyal readers which could be great for bounce rate and the time spent on the site.

Maria Montegro

Maria Montegro on November 16, 2012, 5:00 a.m. Reply

If you want rating system which to be visible in the search engines you should go for the rating systems the search engines provide. Such are +1 for Google etc. Unfortunately there is no other way.

Emma Coleman

Emma Coleman on December 12, 2012, 1:22 p.m. Reply

What does 27 mean? Every new user get a new blog? What if he or she doesn’t want a new blog, but some other kind of service?

Matt Stoner

Matt Stoner on December 24, 2012, 2:43 a.m. Reply

Personally I don’t like the feature - Integrated email notifications. It seems a bit spammy for me and this is why I don’t use it.

Byrne Reese

Byrne Reese was previously the Product Manager of Movable Type at Six Apart, where he had also held positions as the Manager of Platform Technology and Product Manager for TypePad. Byrne is a huge supporter of the Movable Type user and developer community. He dedicates much of his time to promoting and educating people about Movable Type as well as building the tools and plugins for Movable Type that are showcased on Majordojo. He contributes regularly to open source; and he is an advocate for open protocols and standards like Atom and OpenID.

Website: http://profile.typekey.com/byrnereese