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The beta version of Movable Type (MT) 4, provides a 'reinvented' user interface with a dashboard overview of all of your blogs; support for publishing standalone pages and managing file assets and images; new community features; and a redesigned component architecture designed to make it faster and more scalable.

Six Apart has extended MT by incorporating technologies from its three other Web tools TypePad, LiveJournal and Vox.

'Each of them was designed to reach people Movable Type couldn't connect to,' Six Apart's Anil Dash explained. 'And now that they're all on the path to getting their audiences, we can take their technology, and the lessons they've taught us, and bring them back to Movable Type.'

From TypePad, MT gains

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tools for managing the non-blog content of sites such as standalone pages and media assets. From LiveJournal comes technologies like OpenID and support for memcached to speed up database access. And from Vox, the new interface.

According to Dash the new features will keep MT ahead of some high-profile competition.

'The new version's enhancements keep Movable Type ahead of the rudimentary blogging capabilities that vendors such as IBM and Microsoft have begun putting in their collaboration platforms,' he said.

His comments were echoed by Forrester Research analyst Rob Koplowitz.

'No one has anything as robust as Movable Type. Six Apart has a big head start,' he commented, adding that it is 'clearly doing the most interesting blogging stuff in the enterprise'. Key to this could be the decision to release the MT code under the GPL open-source license, which will enable enterprises and software developers to build applications around the core blogging technology.

The Movable Type 4 Beta is available from movabletype.com/mt4.