Easier to use than ever, MT4 provides the most powerful blog tools for any size organization

San Francisco, CA – June 5, 2007 – Six Apart, the world’s leading independent blogging software and services company, today announced the beta release of Movable Type 4, a blogging platform designed to meet the website content management needs of growing organizations and to serve as a social media platform that enables businesses to create community-driven websites. This beta release continues Movable Type’s tradition of powering many of the web’s most popular blogs for over five years.

Today’s announcement marks the first of a series of new products, features, and services around Six Apart’s flagship blogging platform that will be unveiled throughout the summer.

“We support a wide range of industry leaders for publishing, marketing, and internal communications,” said Chris Alden, EVP and General Manager of the Professional Division at Six Apart. “These are world-class blogs, organizations and individuals that demand flexibility, scalability and interactivity as they deploy blogs on a global scale. MT4 has been re-designed and re-architected as a platform to address their needs while providing a basis to build social networking features that re-define the scope of blogging.”

Movable Type powers blogs across many industries and the not-for-profit world from the Washington Post to the Huffington Post, from General Motors to Nissan Motors, Boeing to BoingBoing, Intel to Instapundit, and many more blogging standouts like TBWA/Chiat Day, Dooce, and New York University.

Six Apart also announced the inauguration of the Movable Type Open Source Project, an initiative that will culminate in the release of an open source version of Movable Type in Q3 of this year. Developers and customers interested in the project can visit www.movabletype.org for more information.

The new Movable Type includes numerous features and improvements that make it the easiest and most powerful way for individuals, small businesses and companies to begin, then scale their blogging initiatives:

• MT4 includes more than 50 new features that make it easier than ever to use, including an installation and upgrade wizard, easier and more powerful template management tools that speed site development, all new default templates and themes to help users create great looking blogs in minutes, and a completely redesigned user interface focused on streamlining common tasks. Advanced WYSIWYG composition and editing make for a dramatically easier posting experience, while a system dashboard with dynamic graphic display gives an easy-to-read, yet powerful summary of recent activity.

• MT4 is a social media platform that allows users to turn their audiences into communities. Readers can become members of a website through Movable Type’s community management features, with rights to post alongside authors and to add and share rich text and media posts with photos, videos, and audio. MT4 also expands community with a new ratings framework to enable a variety of recommendation features. Look for more information later in the beta period about an optional functionality pack with even more community features, as well as further details about Movable Type’s vastly improved capabilities for fighting blog spam.

• MT4 saves users time by allowing management of many blogs and many users in a central interface. Users can install, manage and publish thousands of blogs with one installation. The Movable Type aggregator pulls multiple blogs into a single blog, while customizable roles and groups enable more effective user management. Look for more information later in the beta period about an optional functionality pack with enterprise capabilities for Movable Type.

• MT4 can power an entire web site – not just a blog. MT4 provides the power and flexibility to build web sites that are easy to manage and easy to update at a fraction of the cost of traditional content management systems. New content and asset management tools make uploading and revising photos, documents, and videos incredibly easy. Users can create standalone web pages that automatically inherit the design of the blog, to ensure the entire site has a consistent look and feel. Easy-to-use template management tools put the focus where it belongs: on content, not on code.

• MT4 scales to meet the needs of growing organizations with the most advanced technology, power and performance. Six Apart runs some of the largest sites on the Internet, and has brought the technology that powers these world class sites into Movable Type. MT4 leverages open technologies developed at Six Apart that help scale and build community in Vox, LiveJournal and TypePad, as well as Web 2.0 sites from AOL, Microsoft, Digg, Wikipedia, Craigslist and Facebook. These technologies include database caching through Memcached and authenticating of users with OpenID. Movable Type can be run in multi-server environments, with broad support for operating systems (Linux, Windows, and Solaris) and databases (MySQL, PosgreSQL, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server).

• MT4's new component-based architecture lets users choose product extensions that enable advanced functionality. MT4 introduces a new architecture for the Movable Type platform that unifies its commercial and enterprise product lines while enabling advanced capabilities with optional functionality packs. Making use of Movable Type’s open plug-in API, Six Apart has architected the platform to accommodate full-featured packs that support enterprise integration, community management and other complete solutions.

MT4 includes the world-class customer support that Six Apart has provided since Movable Type’s inception. In addition, the blogging world’s largest international network of professional consultants, developers, designers and business professionals is available to customers to provide customization and extra services when desired.

Pricing and Availability
Developers and customers can download a beta version of Movable Type 4.0 at www.movabletype.org, and are encouraged to provide feedback at the beta community website at the same URL. Personal use of Movable Type continues to be free, with no restrictions placed upon the number of blogs or authors. Personal use customers have the option to purchase support separately if needed. Commercial, Education, and Non-Profit licenses for the current version of Movable Type, MT3.35, will include a discounted upgrade to MT4.0 during the beta period. Existing users may buy upgrades to MT4.0 at a pre-release discount. Enterprise customers should contact their Account Manager or sales@sixapart.com for MT4.0 discounts and information on enterprise packs during the beta period. For detailed pricing information please visit www.movabletype.com/pricing.

About Six Apart
Six Apart Ltd. provides award-winning blogging software and services that change the way millions of individuals, organizations, and corporations connect and communicate across the world every day. Founded in 2002 by husband and wife team Ben Trott and Mena G. Trott, Six Apart has grown into a global company with its headquarters in San Francisco, CA, and offices in Europe and Japan. The company continues to lead in the blogging and social media industry with the Movable Type publishing platform, the TypePad hosted blogging service, LiveJournal, an online community organized around personal journals, and Vox, a free blogging service for friends and families. For more information visit the Six Apart corporate web site at http://www.sixapart.com/.

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