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Movable Type

Score8 out of 10

16 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Movable Type?

Movable Type is a Perl-based content management system from Six Apart, featuring the capability to host multiple weblogs and standalone content pages, manage files and user roles, templates, tags, categories, and trackback links.

Categories & Use Cases

Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features Movable Type has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 16 ratings of Movable Type's features
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Top Performing Features

  • WYSIWYG editor

    What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get editing tool allows users to build pages without writing code.

    Category average: 7.9

  • Publishing workflow

    The software allows users to set up a custom workflow for updating the website, including approval processes.

    Category average: 8.2

  • Content taxonomy

    Users can create multiple levels and types of content categories including tags.

    Category average: 8.2

Areas for Improvement

  • Form generator

    Users can build website forms for visitors to fill out.

    Category average: 7.1

  • Bulk management

    Users can change an attribute on a group of documents or sites all at once through features such as global search and replace, making bulk changes easier.

    Category average: 7.8

  • Availability / breadth of extensions

    There is a broad library of extensions, plug-ins, modules or add-ons that allow users to easily customize their websites without building custom code.

    Category average: 6.9

Reviews

What users are saying about Movable Type.
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The best-rated CMS for magazines, blogs, and editorial content

Incentivized
Sophia Ahn
Web Producer at AIGA (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

  • Easy to use straight out of the box, very user friendly with an intuitive interface.
  • Great for team use where there are multiple editors and writers fixing and editing each other's works. It's easy to track who last made the latest edits.
  • Stellar support team and system. I've found that Moveable Type's support system is generally more responsive and helpful than WordPress.

Cons

  • Very difficult to tamper with back-end coding, which is why we had a separate CMS for our bigger articles and interactive content.
  • Limited number of plug-ins compared to other popular CMS like WordPress or Drupal.
  • Not as media friendly as I would like. Movable Type was VERY finicky with embedding video and images. Constantly had to resize images and mess with video size to make sure it would display at the right size on the website.

Return on Investment

  • Because of its simple UI it is THE platform for any quick blog posts that need to be made by end of day.
  • Similarly, editors and freelance reporters who might not be web-savvy can be trained in the CMS in 5-10 minutess, and they can build the simpler posts which means the workflow really sped up for the web production team.
  • Because it's easier to spot problematic comments, and set up certain types of comments to be flagged for the admin, it was easy to keep the site clean(er) of trolls and spammy discussions.

Movable Type great for small sites on shared environments.

Dennis Dewey
Web Developer in Professional Services at Digital Designs (1-10 employees employees)

Pros

  • Renders one or more static pages per node/content item. Static pages are better for high traffic sites because dynamic sites do not always properly implement caching and are more likely to fail from needing a constant database connection.
  • Out of the box, the custom fields in Movable Type are much more intuitive to work with than Wordpress and other blogging platforms. The custom fields even work better than some dedicated content management systems such as Joomla. Custom fields can be defined for several different entity types such as content and taxonomy. The fields show up in the new content form and are easy to find and use.
  • The templating language in Movable Type is extremely rich and has many nice features built in. There is less of a need to extend for further templating functionality and you can also add some of your own PHP to the mix to add more features.

Cons

  • The installation of Movable Type still needs improvement. I've had to learn quite a bit about setting up my own apache servers in the past, but most of the needed modules for Movable Type come preinstalled nowadays with many server stacks.
  • The customization of the backend is much more complicated in comparison to Wordpress or other content management systems. It is difficult to rebrand the backend interface without hacking core files.
  • The licensing of Movable Type is confusing, keeps changing and now you're unable to get an open source version of MT6.x.
  • Movable Type could use its own command line utility like Drush for Drupal.

Return on Investment

  • It works well enough on shared hosting so it yields good returns in situations where your client cannot afford dedicated servers.

My type is Movable Type

Jean Louis
Web Designer/Developer in Information Technology at eVariant (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

  • User-friendly interface which makes it very easy to navigate.
  • It allows you to easily create multiple blogs in one installation.
  • I like the long list of plugins that are available to use.

Cons

  • Better gallery plugin
  • Publishing
  • Template tools

Return on Investment

  • It's a good tool when it comes to blogging.
  • There a lot for a developer to know and understand when building a template.
  • It is no longer free.

Movable Type - Good platform that wants to be free

Mark Guthrie
Marketing Web Developer in Marketing at Axia Home Loans (1-10 employees employees)

Pros

  • Blogging
  • Content Management
  • User Roles

Cons

  • It cost too much
  • Should be free
  • Creating your own templates should be easier

Return on Investment

  • The Internal Communications has greatly benefited from it
  • Provided a place for our files in one central location

Flexible & Multi-Purposed Website Platform

Kurtis Amundson
Website Developer at Amundson Studios (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

  • Movable type seamlessly integrates multiple websites in one installation which allows easy access to the content and design.
  • Template tags and coding is well documented by Movable Type to provide developers like me the tools required to make completely custom designs.
  • The more recent versions of Movable Type have really upped the ante on how broadly the platform can be used (such as for blogs, forums, e-commerce, etc.)

Cons

  • Especially on the older versions, the limited number of well-developed third-party plugins is problematic for efficiently developing a well-functioning website.
  • Versions of movable type which didn't allow pages to be constructed were difficult to create continuity in design and easily editable pages for our editors.
  • The installation process could be simplified to make it easier for those new to a CMS to install.

Return on Investment

  • Movable Type definitely increased employee efficiency. Having everyone on the same platform to edit multiple websites from system is crucial.
  • Expanding our website presence was a super simple process with Movable Type. All we needed to do was add another site, destination folder, and we're ready to go.
  • Having all of our web designers on the same platform helped immensely with communicating information and structuring education for new employees.

Alternatives Considered

WordPress,ExpressionEngine