Movable Type 4.2 has been released and is available for download. It now includes the Community Pack as a built-in feature of MT, without any additional charges!

We've tested version 4.2 internally and found it so much faster out of the box than the previous 4.12 version. Just by uploading the new files you will see great speed performance.

Search was completely rewritten, with common queries being 100 times as fast. Core publishing is 2 to 3 times as fast out of the box, and if you enable template module caching or automatic use of includes, we've heard results of 10x as fast or more.

One of our corporate customers running version 4.12 had to wait roughly 4 hours for their blog to rebuild. As soon as they upgraded to the 4.2, the upgrade took only 9 minutes. That is unbelievable speed.

We've also seen some issues when upgrading from 4.12 to 4.2 where a blog will not rebuild unless some changes are made to the blog's custom designed templates, and/or plugins.

As always, I recommend creating a backup copy of your current Movable Type blog before upgrading. Businesses and Corporate users are recommended to create a development environment with a mirror copy of their current blog, and test the upgrade there, before upgrading their live blogs and then facing problems.

Feel free to check our blog services page for help with Movable Type 4.2 Upgrade.

Based on our sources at Six Apart, Movable Type 4.2 will be released very shortly. The wait is almost done, dear bloggers. Watch our announcements page for the release news, download location, and of course installation and upgrade instructions. If you get stuck you can always check our blog services for assistance.

Just to remind everyone, by upgrading to Movable Type 4.2 your blog will work approximately 30% faster, so it is totally worth it. If you are upgrading from Movable Type 3.x then I recommend checking our blog post describing issues you might run into, and the steps you can take to avoid them.

Happy blogging!

We've installed a commercial edition of Movable Type with the Professional Pack so you can see how the design looks comparing to the standard templates. This is especially helpful if you're planning to have a blog, and would like an instant, professional design presence instead of the standard not so attractive design.

To compare the options:

http://www.movabletype.me
http://www.movabletype.me/classic

Here is a great idea - get Commercial Edition Movable Type with the Pro Pack, then customize that template to suit your needs. This will be a lot more affordable than hiring someone to design a blog completely from scratch.

I will be in San Francisco on July 20th, meeting some folks from Adobe to discuss blog hosting and custom blog services by FirmDot. This will be my first time in San Francisco. I hope someone can recommend interesting places I should see while I'm there.

Next day I'm flying to Los Angeles to check on our new data center, and to make sure things are running smooth.

Some of many requests we get here at FirmDot are to upgrade Movable Type 3 to Movable Type 4. What many customers don't know is Movable Type 4 uses a completely different template structure from MT 3, which means upgrading might break your existing blog. In addition to that, some Movable Type 3 plugins no longer work, or have been replaced by newer, MT 4 plugins.

Here is what we do - the recommended course of action is to setup a development environment on your hosting account with a duplicate copy of your Movable Type 3 blog. Then upgrade that development environment to Movable Type 4 and rebuild your blog. Then make a couple of test posts. If it works - Great! You can now safely upgrade your live environment. If your blog doesn't rebuild - it's time to re-code your templates to make them MT 4 friendly.

Please note that to take advantage of the new features of Movable Type 4, the templates will need to be converted (re-coded). Yes, it may be time consuming and cost you money, however in the long run you'll be glad you did. Everything is shifting towards Movable Type 4 and all previous versions will eventually not be supported by Six Apart.