Six Apart’s Mov­able Type was once the pre­mier blog pub­lish­ing sys­tem, with rev­o­lu­tion­ary, industry-leading fea­tures, includ­ing unri­valed mul­ti­site sup­port. How­ever, they alien­ated their user com­mu­nity with a con­tro­ver­sial licens­ing change in 2004, an arguably mis­han­dled release of ver­sion 5 in 2010, and a dis­con­cert­ing reor­ga­ni­za­tion later that year.

Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity main­tained an enter­prise license with Six Apart for four years. How­ever, the high cost of the yearly license became dif­fi­cult to jus­tify, and the dimin­ish­ing base of users and devel­op­ers greatly con­cerned us. A Japan­ese IT com­pany now owns the Mov­able Type prod­uct, and another com­pany has assumed respon­si­bil­ity for world­wide tech­ni­cal sup­port. We have no expe­ri­ence with either of these organizations.

While a small com­mu­nity of devel­op­ers is stead­fastly work­ing to keep Mov­able Type alive, and the plat­form may once again flour­ish in one form or another; we felt that it was time to move on.

The Word­Press plat­form is a sta­ble, inno­v­a­tive pub­lish­ing sys­tem with a vast library of third-party plu­g­ins and themes. It pow­ers over 60 mil­lion web­sites, includ­ing 22% of new active domains in the United States. An expan­sive, vibrant com­mu­nity of Word­Press users and devel­op­ers are con­tin­u­ally improv­ing the soft­ware, offer­ing sup­port, writ­ing tuto­ri­als, and shar­ing best prac­tices. We look for­ward to fos­ter­ing an active com­mu­nity of Word­Press users within Princeton.

Posted in: Mov­able Type to WordPress