When Six Apart first announced it would release an open source version of the popular blogging tool, Movable Type, it initially indicated that the open source variation would lack some of the features in the proprietary version. However the company seems to have changed its mind.

SixApart, a blogging pioneer and top supplier of blogging software to businesses, on June 5 announced it would transition its flagship product, Movable Type, to an open-source platform by the third quarter of this year.

As the popularity of blogs continues to rise, blogging software platforms continue to evolve. With the recent release of version 4.1, the popular Movable Type application offers improvements that allow bloggers to expand their control over the publishing process.

I've blogged a bit recently on how hard it is to install Movable Type and have it actually work on your own server. After getting and configuring Apache and MySQL (or PostgreSQL or SQlite), making sure you get the static files in the right place and the CGI/Perl files in the other right place, then making sure everything has the proper permissions ... I found it to be way beyond my capabilities.

While blogging platforms like WordPress and Movable Type have considerable name recognition among Web users, few outside the development community know about this flexible and open-source content management system Drupal, which powers sites like Sony BMG's Myplay, PopSci.com, and the Web 2.0 blog Center Networks.

I decided to start from scratch with my Debian server project. Last time I was too hasty in adding the open-source version of Movable Type to my installation and intermingling files before I was ready.

MODx, an open source content management system (CMS) and PHP application framework comparable to WordPress or Movable Type, recently won Packt Publishing's Most Promising Open Source CMS award. The application works with either Apache or Internet Information Services (IIS) and supports almost any browser.

For reasons I won’t go into here, I want to move my previous blog off of my domain and import it into either Blogger or Vox — neither of which I’m really using at the moment. But getting my almost 600 posts out of ExpressionEngine is needlessly difficult, and doesn’t seem to work. Even if I could manage to do it the resulting data is still only readable by Movable Type.

Microsoft has launched Oxite, an open source blogging platform. However, the software maker was quick to underline that the product is aimed at developers and not intended to directly compete with popular blogging software such as WordPress or Movable Type.