Editor’s note (April 2026): This article is part of the Blog Herald’s editorial archives. Originally published in April 2008, it has been revised 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 was released, a hackathon was planned, and the platform’s development community was doing what the best communities do – submitting bugs, providing patches, and moving the software forward together. In retrospect now, this dispatch reads less like a tech update and more like a document from a tipping point—one that, in retrospect, was already quietly going down the wrong path.
The platform has a long history worth understanding, and its arc carries lessons that are useful for anyone publishing on the web today.
What happened in 2008
The April 2008 update was based on Portable Type Open Source 4.15 beta, codenamed Cal after the Battlestar Galactica character. The release was truly impressive for its time. Enhanced publishing interface and modular caching, including full commenting, template previews, redesigned search engine and server-side. Community mailing lists were active. Developer Hiroyaka Ogawa from the MTOS community directly handled a number of performance improvements. A hackathon was in the works, a two-day event proposed for San Francisco by Niall Kennedy to mix presentations with in-person collaboration.
On paper, it looked like a booming platform. Community driven open source project, regular releases, engaged developers. What was harder to see then was that this energy was already fragile.
Just four years ago, in 2004, Six Apart introduced license changes that limited the free use of Movable Type, requiring payment for multiple blogs or authors. Confusion and the resentment that follows It sent a wave of users to WordPress—users who, once they leave, rarely come back. The 2007 open source release was a course correction, but trust is slow to be restored. In 2008, community activity was real, but it was downstream of a credibility problem that was never fully resolved.
How the platform evolved and where it is now
The open source version of Movable Type continued for several more years, with the last official MTOS release coming out in 2015. Six Apart was rebuilt and sold. In 2011the commercial platform was acquired by Infocom, a Japanese IT company. From this point on, the story of Movable Type became almost entirely a Japanese story. There it found a strong market – tens of thousands of commercial sites, active developer communities, corporate customers – while largely disappearing from the Anglophone network.
Since early 2026, Movable Type continues to release updates. Version 9.0.6 arrived in February 2026 and addressed security patches across multiple branches. The platform is live, actively maintained, and truly beneficial to the organizations that rely on it. But its global market share is about 0.01% of all web content management systems. TypePad, Six Apart’s blogging service that once competed with WordPress.com, shut down for good in September 2025 after more than two decades of slow decline. WordPress, by contrast, now powers about 43% of all websites on the internet.
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’s tempting to paint this as a story about open source beating proprietary software, or society beating corporate control. Those elements are part of it. But the more accurate lesson is about trust and what happens when a platform breaks it.
The 2004 license change was not disastrous in itself. The terms were later changed. Free personal version restored. But the incident revealed something that users couldn’t see: that rules can change at any time, affecting the work they’ve already built. This question never came up after entering the room.
WordPress’ GPL license offered a different proposition. Not just free in cost, but free in permanence. Code should always be modifiable, redistributable, and independent of any company’s strategic decisions. This certainty grew stronger over time. Developers built plugins with confidence. Designers shared themes. The authors have documented their solutions. Each contribution made the platform easier to use, which attracted more participants, which made it even easier. The open-source version of Movable Type never generated this kind of self-reinforcing momentum, as a lack of trust made developers wary of building on a foundation that had already changed once.
There is a broader principle here that goes far beyond CMS options. Platforms don’t just compete on features. They compete over the validity of the secret contract between the platform and the people built on it. When this contract is vague – even once – the costs are often paid for years.
What it means for publishers today
Most bloggers and independent publishers are not choosing between WordPress and Movable Type in 2026. The competition has long since been settled. However, the main dynamics have not disappeared. He just moved to a new area.
Today’s equivalent questions involve platforms like Substack, Beehiiv, and Medium—services whose terms of use, monetization rules, and ownership structures aren’t always aligned with the interests of the creators who build audiences there. The convenience of these platforms is real. So is addiction. A creator creating a newsletter list within a proprietary platform is, in a sense, in the same position as a user of Movable Type in 2004: trusting that the rules will remain stable, that access will not be restricted, that the work they’ve invested in will remain theirs.
2008 The Movable Type community was doing the right thing. Talented developers were submitting bugs and providing code. A hackathon was being organized. New features were delivery. None of this was enough to overcome the trust deficit that had been created years ago and has never been fully repaired.
For anyone building on the web today, this remains the most useful takeaway from that moment in blogging history. Features are important. Community issues. But basically everything rests on most issues. When you choose where to build, you’re not just choosing a tool. You choose whose decisions you are willing to live with about the future.
The conclusion of the April 2008 news was, in retrospect, a brief flourish at the edge of a long decline. The lesson is not that Portable Type failed because it was worse. It’s a way to get over it, confidence once lost.
