Movable Type 3 Developer Edition is out.

Stirred quite a controversy and lots of anger, huh…

While I think it’s perfectly reasonable that a company start trying to make some serious money off their product (gotta pay Mie after all :[/mfn] I think what most people are complaining about, is the steep pricing mechanism: of course there still is a free version, but if (like so many) you happen to have more than one author and/or more than three blogs on your site, the first price comes to $70 and goes very quickly up with each new blog/author.

Problem is, for as much as I like MT and appreciate the work that’s been put into it, $70 is, both psychologically and in regards to the competition, too high to justify such an investment. I mean, MT is a fine product, but let’s face it, most of its core could be coded (better and faster) by one or two people in less than a week (granted: with an interface nowhere near as polished). The only feature that really makes it stand apart is its flawless handling of multiple blogs/authors and good support of web standard technologies (xml, atom, xml-rpc etc). If you remove the former from the free bundle, it doesn’t hold a candle to some other free solution out there.

Further more, I personally think (and seem to be one of many), that a revamped commenting system is a tad light as the only prominent feature in a major update. It makes it hard to justify an upgrade.

To conclude, it might be more realistic and in tune with the market to offer a personal use license for under $30 that covers up to a dozen blogs/authors, while charging “real” commercial prices for corporate use. As for me, I think I will stick with this version for a while and might consider switching to WordPress in the future: its architecture is definitely nicer, and the fact it is open-source and written in PHP makes it infinitely more appealing to my inner-geek (plus the moral bonus of being able to contribute by coding)…