MovableType goes Free / Open Source

MovableType has gone back to having a free version for personal use.  They're also going open source.  That's good news, as I really liked it back in the olden days.  WordPress has proven to be functional, but the architecture leaves something to be desired, and the full-runtime nature is good for authors but bad for developers.  As I'm starting to add new functionality to my site (and the various others I host), I've been wishing for some platform independence, and MT might provide that.

For those of you not familiar with it's internals, you write templates in MT's own language that are used to write files to disk.  Those files can be static (*.html/*.xml), or dynamic (*.cfm/*.php/*.jsp).  This affords remarkable flexibility in developing MT-based applications, as you can have a two-pass structure for page rendering.  You also get caching of your blog-based content, as all the transformation/linking/looping over the blog content happens at template render time, not at runtime.

I can't say I'm enthused about Perl (which would be necessary for developing admin plugins), but most of my interests lie on the outside, so we'll see if that's a showstopper.  Not that I'm enthused about PHP today.  ;)

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