Mena Trott of Six Apart has asked a question of the community of Movable Type users: How are you using the tool?
My current setup is very simple, I have two authors – Nadia and myself – on three different MT-weblogs. There’s this main weblog, Nadia’s weblog, and another weblog called Words (which is drastically under-used at the moment). When I taught a class at McGill, I used my installation to do an entirely independent class website as well – one for each semester. Right now, I fit in under the personal license at US$70 (that’s over $100 to we Canadians), and I can live with that (barely). The full US$100 is out of the question, though – I find that very expensive. And when my class sites were up, I don’t know which terms I would have fallen under.
The other issue I worry about is in terms of other projects that I do from time to time. At the moment, for instance, I have been laying the groundwork for a personal project that would involve at least 6-12 authors in one website at another domain. It would be non-commercial (though it would be indistinguishable from a commercial site), but I don’t think I’d pay US$150 plus hosting fees (in addition to a LOT of my time) for such a project. And if I have to ask contributors (who would be doing it for fun) to pay me US$10 each for the privilege, well, it’s doubtful anyone would do that. As far as I am concerned, the current licensing terms make it difficult if not impossible to use MT for a hobbyist publishing initiative, like a small ‘zine or something like that.
M-J says
I’d better get an invite to your new supper-snazzy, top-secret groupblog, boyle.
Jimmy says
Switch to WordPress, it has no restriction whatsoever and no future risk of being charged for upgrades. Also MT 3.0 doesn’t have important new features, it is almost the same as the 2.66. I guess 6A has to do more to get back their users. Author and blog restriction is unacceptable to me.
michael says
I don’t think it’s time to switch yet. I think MT is a good tool. I just think that 6A doesn’t take the business side of things seriously enough, and that gets them into problems like this. There are a lot of questions that have yet to be addressed.
It’s funny that some people have blamed their investors, but it’s clearly not them behind this! If it were the investors, that would mean it’s a whole management team – but such a team wouldn’t be making the amateur-hour mistakes that the company is currently making.
But though they need to solve these problems – for instance, at this point the company should have as many people managing and selling the product as working on the code – I still hold out hope that they will get it together.