Movable Type 4.1 Beta, and a new Reseller Program

This week’s launch of the Movable Type Open Source project was huge news for our community. But as part of that announcement, we promised even more news to come. So today, we’re introducing some of the next steps that will outline how we’re going to fueling that community in the coming weeks and months.

• We’re beginning the beta of Movable Type 4.1 today, with tons of new features.
• We’re announcing the Professional Pack, the first of the extended benefits that paid users of MT will be receiving.
• We’re launching the Movable Type reseller program designed to offer resellers a 30% discount that you can pass on to your customers or keep for yourself.

Each of these announcements on its own would be big news, but one of the things we wanted to demonstrate was how much we value our paying customers who’ve supported MT’s development (the Professional Pack and MT 4.1 will be a free upgrade for all paying customers of MT 4.0), as well as how having an open platform will help benefit everyone who uses Movable Type.

Enough talk — let’s show you what’s coming!

What’s new in Movable Type 4.1?

Here’s what you can look forward to in MT 4.1:

• It’s Faster! We’ve made performance improvements across the board for everythign from publishing to reducing the size of the scripts that load when you want to write a post.
• User Interface Improvements. There are minor tweaks all over the application to make creating and managing your content easier.
• Global Templates. Now you can easily create templates or widgets that are shared across all the blogs in your system.
• Avatars/User Pictures. Authors and commenters can upload an image or icon for themselves that will show up next to their entries and comments.
• Asset Editing. Whether it’s audio, photos, videos or uploaded files, you can view and edit information like the size of a file and its tags, and even see which entries or pages that asset appears in.
• Template Sets. You can create, share and use entire sets of templates between different Movable Type blogs, including all of the stylesheets and feeds for your site. For designers, it’s a great way to deliver a design to your clients.
• Smart Template Tag Documentation. Just use any of Movable Type’s template tags in designing a template, and the system will automatically provide you with a link to the documentation for that tag — handy!
• Better API suport for Pages. Using tools like Windows Live Writer, you can now create and manage Movable Type’s pages just as easily as you work with your entries.
• Tons more. There are lots of little improvements all over the platform — like the ability to replicate published content across multiple servers, or to plug in your own rich text editor like FCKEdit.

You can check out the full details about the MT 4.1 beta on the beta home page.

What’s in the Professional Pack?

We’ll be revealing the full details of the Professional Pack as the official launch of MT 4.1 gets closer, but here’s just some of the benefits for paid users of Movable Type:

• Professional help ticket support direct from the Movable Type team.
• New integrated Custom Fields for Movable Type:
  • Customize the fields for all of your blog entries, with support for uploading images or assets, and creating text fields, pull-down menus, checkboxes, radio buttons, and more
  • Define fields on a per-blog basis
  • Change the order in which fields are displayed on any entry screen
  • Define custom fields not just for entries, but for pages or even folders and categories
  • Completely customize the fields used to describe users in your system — build on MT4.1’s Avatar support
  • Easily embed any of your custom fields in your templates using template tags that the system provides for you

The first beta release of the paid commercial release of MT 4.1 with the Professional Pack is available now. This is an early beta — upgrading from 4.0 isn’t supported yet, and of course betas shouldn’t be used in a production environment.

The Movable Type Reseller Program

And finally, we’ve completely revamped the Movable Type reseller program, and we’ve tripled the cut you get for selling MT. The Reseller Program is a way for all of you who design, develop and deploy Movable Type to get the most benefits from the buzz around MT4. The way it works is simple:

• You get a 30% discount off the retail price of Movable Type
• You choose whether to pass all of part of that discount on to your customers, and pocket the rest.

When you’re accepted into the Reseller Program, here’s some of what you’ll get:

• A Free Movable Type Commercial 5-User License
• Listing on our MT Reseller Partner page
• Discounts on qualifying Movable Type products
• Direct Technical support from the MT team
• Downloadable product and sales sheets
• Exclusive use of the sexy new Movable Type Reseller logo

Signing up for the Reseller Program is easy — just fill out the application form and we’ll read over it and get you into the program as quick as we can. (If you’d worked with our affiliate program in the past, don’t worry — we’re handling our resellers ourselves now, so you don’t have to worry about a complicated third-party affiliate system.)

It’s just getting started

So far, 2007 has been a momentous year for Movable Type: MT4 was released, the Enterprise and Community Solutions launched, MTOS was kicked off, and now we’re off and running towards MT 4.1 with a kick-ass new reseller program backing it up. But we think 2008’s going to be even more amazing, and we hope you’ll be there with us because even after six years, we’re just getting started!