Seed Magazine launches with Movable Type

Seed Magazine, a magazine devoted to the connections between science and society, wanted to relaunch their website along with the redesign of their magazine. It's a beautifully designed, intuitive site, making full use of some of our favorite features of MT. Tim Murtaugh, the designer developer, explains why he and designer Mike Pick chose Movable type thusly:

The site needed a new face, a new undercarriage, and an architecture that could handle their lofty goals of millions of unique visitors per month. Oh, and it needed to happen in two and half months. It seemed clear to us that the only way this could happen was to use an off-the-shelf product, rather than build a custom CMS. We considered a number of options, but right from the beginning we were attracted to Movable Type. Movable Type had a number of things going for it: * It’s mature, which meant two valuable things — It’s been around for years (and has been field-tested to death) and it has an incredibly deep feature-set. We knew it was solid. * It’s no stranger to large-scale implentations. MT is used by About.com and the Gawker network, both of which produce prodigous amounts of content, and rack up huge numbers of hits. * It has a formal support system. I’m a big fan of the open-source community, and the support that’s built into it, but when you’re talking about a significant strategic asset in a company’s portfolio, it’s nice to know the people who built the thing will be there when you need them. * It has a large and active community of plugin contributors. This made it possible to get what is at heart a blogging app to act like a news portal. * We had worked with it before. We knew what it could do, and we knew it was a lot. * Street cred. Everyone knows MT is the bomb, right?

Read on to find out what plug-ins he used to make the site hum, how easy customized RSS feeds are, and what the deal is with the swirly dots in the upper left hand corner.