Movable Type v2.6

Movable Type v2.6 was released today. Movable Type is the name of the Perl/MySQL CMS I’ve been using for a while. Anyone who knows anything about this sort of stuff will tell you that Movable Type is, without a doubt, the de facto standard for personal CMSs. It’s an absolutely brilliant system that allows the author complete control over the layout and design of a website (e.g., this site is entirely hand-coded XHTML/CSS) while taking care of the backend entirely. The more I use it, the more I’m impressed with it.

The upgrade to v2.6 (from v2.51) was as smooth as possible. I had made quite a few changes to some of the search routines in my previous installation. After installing the new files and mirroring the changes, everything was operating as I wanted. No problems.

There is now an official Movable Type Plugin Directory.

While I can’t see myself moving away from Movable Type any time soon, there are a couple of other CMSs I’ve been monitoring. They are each being developed by a single author. The first is Textpattern, from Dean Allen of Textism. The second is Postmaster, from Daniel Benjamin of Hivelogic. I know about these systems because I frequent their blogs daily and they both enjoy talking at length about their upcoming projects. I have to admit, the thing I’m most attracted to about their respective systems is that they use PHP instead of Perl. Just a geek preference.

Like I said, I don’t think I’ll be leaving Movable Type in the near future, but I’ll probably give each of these a shot when they are publicly available.