From today forward I will no longer recommend MovableType as a viable new media blogging / podcasting platform. I will recommend WordPress to any and all that ask my advice.
SixApart in my eyes is a failure in leadership and understanding of the current utilization of their platform by paying customers by both the MT4 team leaders and senior management of Six Apart.
I do not say this lightly and I had hoped that the MT4 product release would have some of the native support WordPress has for new media and podcasting.
This is a product that I believed in significantly. I took the time in early 2005 to discuss how to implement podcasting support in MovableType in my award-winning podcasting book because it was a good platform to publish from at the time.
For the past three years we have relied upon a “single plugin” from Brandon Fuller to allow MovableType users to post our podcast and have compliant RSS feeds with Enclosures:“All was well”.
To my dismay today when working on the upgrade to MT4 I found out that the development team put little or no thought into their supposed announced podcasting support from back in July.
Their mistake was relying on their pronet team to get their implementation right. The sad thing is all they had to do was look at the integrated WordPress functionality to understand why their implementation was flawed. A five minute conversation with a MT user that was a podcaster would have put them on the right track and not set them up for this huge failure.
They bragged to the world on the development blog how MT4 would have podcasting support. Well it’s late November and I have figured out that in simple fact they do not have really have podcasting support for the way the vast majority of us have to publish our shows.
Here is their Fundamental Flaw: They thought (incorrectly) that most podcasters would host their media in the same place as their blog, similar to how you would host an image file on your own site.
Little did they realize that many podcasters are getting multiple thousands of downloads each day, and hosting media on the same server as the blog is not possible.
Today I submitted a trouble ticket asking how to get MT4 to recognize external media in the creation of the RSS feed. This is the reply that confirmed what I figured out at 9am this morning.
Unfortunately, Movable Type 4 does not currently provide a means to recognize externally linked files as assets and include them as an enclosure in an Atom or RSS feed. You may wish to examine the Feed Manager plugin and see if it is able to meet your needs: The MT-Enclosures plugin is currently not compatible with Movable Type 4, so you would not be able to use this plugin in a Movable Type 4 installation.
First of all why is he even talking about ATOM? Who uses Atom and since when is podcasting supported through ATOM? You’re not going to get automated delivery through that protocol on any of the major sites.
Second you have got to be KIDDING me. WordPress has been able to do this for THREE years! So not only can I no longer upgrade to MT4 but I waited three years to go in the opposite direction, unless I can find a dedicated server that can handle the media deliveries and also serve the webpages.
Third, the FeedManager plugin does not do what needs to be done. My only hope is that Brandon Fuller can update his enclosure plugin so at least I don’t have to throw away thousands of dollars of design work.
This shows you the sheer lack of understanding of the MovableType development team and the management of Six Apart.
HELLO, Six Apart this is 2007 and to not have native support for enclosures in 2007 shows that you are no longer in touch with what is happening in the real world.
While they will comment about how great the platform is, and how it handles media delivered internally to a single install in their walled garden, they have no clue as to how the rest of the new media community really works. For a release that is supposed to be about new media maybe they need to make sure they cover the basics that the WordPress team has had in place for three years!