Using Movable Type 4
I bit the bullet and installed Movable Type 4 beta today. I was one or two security updates behind the current version anyway, so I thought I’d try out the beta and see what it was like. I think I can safely say that I’m not disappointed.
Most of the work seems to concentrate on the look and feel of the dashboard, which has been completely redesigned. The interface is more AJAXified and everything looks better than it used to. The installation procedure was also painless, and as a bonus, none of my data (backed-up of course) was lost during the transfer! I didn’t even have to do any editing of configuration files - the installer took care of it all, as well as upgrading my database and removing some unused templates.
One major difference that I’ve seen so far is that now you can make pages just like you can in WordPress. Previously, I split my site into two Movable Type “blogs” - one for the static pages, and another for the Metablog. I used index templates for some of the site and blog entries for many of the inner static pages. I could now theoretically combine these two blogs using pages, but I’ll probably leave that for a while, see what the final released version lets me do, and then go on from there.
They always say that you shouldn’t run beta software in a production environment, but what can I say - I’m writing this in a beta version of Movable Type running on a beta version of Microsoft Windows Home Server! I just can’t resist the urge to try out new things.