Dynamic Publishing support for PostgreSQL and SQLite

It's a common refrain for us to talk about Movable Type's wide platform support, but we really are committed to making sure Movable Type's full power is available on the widest variety of platforms. It's an investment that takes a lot of care and attention, but we think it's well worth the effort.

For example, take databases. Movable Type has long supported multiple databases, with MySQL and Berkeley DB being among the most popular. But two mature, popular open-source database technologies that a lot of our users have requested have also part of our platform support for over two years: PostgreSQL and SQLite.

With Movable Type 3.2, we now extend this database support with our powerful dynamic publishing options. Since version 3.1, Movable Type has offered MySQL users a choice of dynamic publishing either for their whole site or on a per-template basis. This choice lets you balance between scalability and faster publishing times, and the default settings make smart choices for you if you don't want to configure them manually. Now in v3.2, PostgreSQL and SQLite are a happy part of the family of dynamic publishing databases as well.

The ability to have the same exact functionality, configuration and templates with different database is not only convenient, but often necessary if, as most of you have indicated, your development environment is different than your testing or deployment environments. As Professional Network member Tim Appnel has amply documented in his entry entitled "SQLite: The Best MT Database Choice Most of the Time", SQLite doesn't require a separate database server at all so you can get up and running easily on your development machine. Once you've created your site, you can choose PostgreSQL or MySQL as your scalable, robust production database, with the backing of their strong developer communities and commercial support vendors.

We welcome you SQLite and PostgreSQL users to the world of dynamic publishing in Movable Type and we look forward to pushing forward in the future both in terms of breadth and depth of the application's already broad platform support.

[This is part seventeen in a series called "Our 32 Favorite Features of Movable Type 3.2".]