Editor’s note (April 2026): This article is part of Blog Herald’s editorial archive. Originally published in April 2008, it has been reviewed and updated to ensure accuracy and relevance for today’s readers.
In April 2008, the Movable Type community was buzzing. A new open-source beta had just dropped, a hackathon was being planned, and the platform’s developer community was doing what the best communities do — filing bugs, submitting patches, and pushing the software forward together. Looking back now, that dispatch reads less like a tech update and more like a document from a turning point — one that, in hindsight, was already quietly going the wrong way.
The platform has a long history worth understanding, and its arc carries lessons that remain useful for anyone who publishes on the web today.
What was happening in 2008
The April 2008 update centred on the Movable Type Open Source 4.15 beta, codenamed Cal after a character from Battlestar Galactica. The release was genuinely impressive for its time. Full comment threading, template previews, a rebuilt search engine, and a beefed-up publishing interface with server-side includes and module caching. The community mailing lists were active. Hiroyaka Ogawa, a developer from the MTOS community, had directly driven a number of the performance improvements. There was a hackathon in the works — a two-day event proposed for San Francisco by Niall Kennedy, intended to blend presentations with in-person collaboration.
On paper, it looked like a platform with momentum. A community-driven open-source project, regular releases, engaged developers. What was harder to see at the time was that this energy was already fragile.
Just four years earlier, in 2004, Six Apart had introduced licensing changes that restricted Movable Type’s free use, requiring payment for multiple blogs or authors. The confusion and resentment that followed sent a wave of users toward WordPress — users who, once gone, rarely came back. The 2007 open-source release was a course correction, but trust is slow to rebuild. The community activity in 2008 was real, but it was downstream of a credibility problem that had never been fully resolved.
How the platform evolved — and where it stands now
The open-source version of Movable Type continued for a few more years, with the last official MTOS release landing in 2015. Six Apart, meanwhile, was restructured and sold. In 2011, the commercial platform was acquired by Infocom, a Japanese IT company. From that point forward, Movable Type’s story became almost entirely a Japanese one. It found a strong market there — tens of thousands of commercial sites, active developer communities, enterprise customers — while largely disappearing from the anglophone web.
As of early 2026, Movable Type continues to release updates. Version 9.0.6 arrived in February 2026, addressing security patches across multiple branches. The platform is alive, actively maintained, and genuinely useful for the organisations that rely on it. But its global market share sits at roughly 0.01% of all web content management systems. TypePad, Six Apart’s hosted blogging service that once competed directly with WordPress.com, shut down entirely in September 2025 after more than two decades of slow decline. WordPress, by contrast, now powers around 43% of all websites on the internet.
The divergence is one of the most instructive stories in the history of digital publishing.
What the gap between MT and WordPress actually tells us
It is tempting to frame this as a story about open source beating proprietary software, or about community beating corporate control. Those elements are part of it. But the more precise lesson is about trust, and about what happens when a platform breaks it.
The 2004 licensing change was not, in itself, catastrophic. The terms were later reversed. A free personal version was restored. But the incident revealed something that users could not un-see: that the rules could change at any time, in ways that would affect work they had already built. Once that question entered the room, it never left.
WordPress’s GPL licensing offered a different proposition. Not just free as in cost, but free as in permanence. The code would always be modifiable, redistributable, and independent of any single company’s strategic decisions. That assurance compounded over time. Developers built plugins with confidence. Designers shared themes. Writers documented their solutions. Each contribution made the platform easier to use, which attracted more contributors, which made it easier still. Movable Type’s open-source version never generated that kind of self-reinforcing momentum, in part because the trust deficit made developers cautious about building on a foundation that had already shifted once.
There is a broader principle here that applies well beyond CMS choices. Platforms do not just compete on features. They compete on the reliability of the implicit contract between the platform and the people who build on it. When that contract becomes uncertain — even once — the cost is often paid for years.
What this means for publishers today
Most bloggers and independent publishers are not choosing between WordPress and Movable Type in 2026. The competition has long since resolved. But the underlying dynamic has not gone away. It has simply moved to new terrain.
Today’s equivalent questions involve platforms like Substack, Beehiiv, and Medium — services where the terms of use, monetisation rules, and ownership structures are controlled by a company whose interests may not always align with the creators who build audiences there. The convenience of these platforms is real. So is the dependency. A creator who builds a newsletter list inside a proprietary platform is, in some meaningful sense, in the same position as a Movable Type user in 2004: trusting that the rules will remain stable, that access will not be restricted, that the work they have invested will remain theirs.
The 2008 Movable Type community was doing the right things. Talented developers were filing bugs and contributing code. A hackathon was being organised. New features were shipping. None of that was enough to overcome a trust deficit that had been created years earlier and never fully repaired.
For anyone building on the web today, that remains the most useful thing to take from that moment in blogging history. Features matter. Community matters. But the foundation everything sits on matters most. When you choose where to build, you are not just choosing a tool. You are choosing whose decisions about the future you are willing to live with.
The April 2008 news wrapup was, in retrospect, a brief flourishing at the edge of a long decline. The lesson is not that Movable Type failed because it was worse. It is that trust, once lost, has a way of outlasting everything else.
