Movable Type Reviews and Ratings

Rating: 8 out of 10

Score

8 out of 10

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Movable Type are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Intuitive and Easy-to-Use Custom Fields: Several users have found the custom fields in Movable Type to be intuitive and easy to work with, even when compared to other popular blogging platforms. They appreciate that custom fields can be defined for different entity types and are easy to find and use in the new content form.

Rich Templating Language: Many reviewers have praised the rich templating language in Movable Type, mentioning that it comes with numerous built-in features. They note that there is less need to extend for further templating functionality, and some users even mention adding their own PHP code to enhance the features.

User-Friendly Interface: Users consistently highlight that Movable Type is easy to use straight out of the box, thanks to its user-friendly interface. Navigation is effortless, making it a breeze for both beginners and experienced users alike.

Reviews

10 Reviews

The best-rated CMS for magazines, blogs, and editorial content

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

July 7, 2015

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We had two CMS used by our fashion publication - one was an in house, custom made CMS which was clunkier but more flexible with back end coding, and the other was Movable Type, which we used for our shorter, newsier blog posts since content was easy to build for producers, and even editors and freelance writers who weren't well versed in web production.

Pros

Easy to use straight out of the box, very user friendly with an intuitive interface.
Great for team use where there are multiple editors and writers fixing and editing each other's works. It's easy to track who last made the latest edits.
Stellar support team and system. I've found that Moveable Type's support system is generally more responsive and helpful than WordPress.

Cons

Very difficult to tamper with back-end coding, which is why we had a separate CMS for our bigger articles and interactive content.
Limited number of plug-ins compared to other popular CMS like WordPress or Drupal.
Not as media friendly as I would like. Movable Type was VERY finicky with embedding video and images. Constantly had to resize images and mess with video size to make sure it would display at the right size on the website.

Likelihood to Recommend

For the purpose of simple, day-to-day blogging, Movable Type will get the job done. As I mentioned before, it has an intuitive UI so that most beginners can pick it up and build a simple blog post. But if you're looking for a CMS that will host multimedia content, interactive content, or any "fancy" production that goes beyond paragraphs and bullet points, then I would recommend something different - maybe even a custom CMS for the maximum control over your website's back-end coding. Keep in mind that the CMS does have some quirks and can be finicky, but the support staff is extremely helpful and available.

Sophia Ahn

Web Producer at AIGA (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

My type is Movable Type

Rating: 6 out of 10

May 14, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used Movable Type as a blogging tool for our editors/writers. With the amount of content being posted to our site on a daily basis, the blogging platform helped boost our SEO strategy.

I've also used Movable Type to build CMSs for a lot of my clients that were looking to manage their own websites. The CMS helped makes it easy to update content on your website and at the same time allows you to post blog entries on a daily basis. This helps keep customers informed of company announcements.

Pros

User-friendly interface which makes it very easy to navigate.
It allows you to easily create multiple blogs in one installation.
I like the long list of plugins that are available to use.

Cons

Better gallery plugin
Publishing
Template tools

Likelihood to Recommend

Will this be used just for blogging or will this be used as a content management system?

What plugin will I need for my website? Some CMS have plugin but they may not function the way you would like them to. So always do your research before making a selection on what CMS to use.

Jean Louis

Web Designer/Developer in Information Technology at eVariant (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

Movable Type great for small sites on shared environments.

Rating: 7 out of 10

May 8, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I was using Movable Type to set up small-medium sized websites for various clients including my own portfolio website for myself. It is a good lightweight CMS and blogging platform. I would usually choose Movable Type over Wordpress because it is more reliable out of the box. It is difficult to "Fireball" a Movable Type site because the platform creates static pages.

Pros

Renders one or more static pages per node/content item. Static pages are better for high traffic sites because dynamic sites do not always properly implement caching and are more likely to fail from needing a constant database connection.
Out of the box, the custom fields in Movable Type are much more intuitive to work with than Wordpress and other blogging platforms. The custom fields even work better than some dedicated content management systems such as Joomla. Custom fields can be defined for several different entity types such as content and taxonomy. The fields show up in the new content form and are easy to find and use.
The templating language in Movable Type is extremely rich and has many nice features built in. There is less of a need to extend for further templating functionality and you can also add some of your own PHP to the mix to add more features.

Cons

The installation of Movable Type still needs improvement. I've had to learn quite a bit about setting up my own apache servers in the past, but most of the needed modules for Movable Type come preinstalled nowadays with many server stacks.
The customization of the backend is much more complicated in comparison to Wordpress or other content management systems. It is difficult to rebrand the backend interface without hacking core files.
The licensing of Movable Type is confusing, keeps changing and now you're unable to get an open source version of MT6.x.
Movable Type could use its own command line utility like Drush for Drupal.

Likelihood to Recommend

Is your business an enterprise level business that has more than a half dozen different content types? If so, then you might want to use a dedicated CMS rather than Movable Type. Movable Type is best used on small / medium sized businesses and is not the best solution for a full-fledged CMS. If you're using your content for something other than just displaying a website, then it's probably not for you. Movable Type works great for news/blogging sites. In fact, Daring Fireball, one of the most popular Apple-centric blogs is using Movable Type as its publishing platform.

Dennis Dewey

Web Developer in Professional Services at Digital Designs (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Moveable Type @ The Daily Collegian

Rating: 7 out of 10

May 2, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Moveable Type was used in a CMS function to reproduce print stories quickly online for my college's student newspaper. We were able to copy and paste stories into the CMS, attach the appropriate tags, and publish the stories so they would appear online as the print version of the newspaper was produced.

Pros

Tagging
Pages
Archiving

Cons

Security
Multimedia integration
Memory leaks

Likelihood to Recommend

I feel that Moveable type is a good application for CMS work. My only issue was that it somehow became corrupted, and my paper's entire archives were unavailable for more than a year. I am unsure if this had to do with Moveable Type itself or the departure of our company's skilled web developer and his unqualified replacement disrupting the code.

James Warkulwiz

Web Manager in Information Technology at New World Media Management (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Movable Type - Good platform that wants to be free

Rating: 6 out of 10

April 30, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It is used as the company intranet. I set up a MT site for each employee to log in to for internal resources. This minimizes calls to each department because people can just log in to the intranet and get what they need. It is used across the entire organization.

Pros

Blogging
Content Management
User Roles

Cons

It cost too much
Should be free
Creating your own templates should be easier

Likelihood to Recommend

Ask yourself if you want to pay for it because Wordpress can do everything MT can, and it is free.

Mark Guthrie

Marketing Web Developer in Marketing at Axia Home Loans (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

Flexible & Multi-Purposed Website Platform

Rating: 8 out of 10

April 30, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The Creative Media Department of our company used Movable Type to manage many of the websites that our company ran. From the President's Blog to the news pages on our ministry partner's websites, our creative staff was able to make any design and content adjustments to all of our websites from a single installation. We also had several stand-alone websites for expeditions which were hosted by the software and accessible by additional users. Having all of the content management for multiple websites available in one location really was key for our company needs and workflow.

Pros

Movable type seamlessly integrates multiple websites in one installation which allows easy access to the content and design.
Template tags and coding is well documented by Movable Type to provide developers like me the tools required to make completely custom designs.
The more recent versions of Movable Type have really upped the ante on how broadly the platform can be used (such as for blogs, forums, e-commerce, etc.)

Cons

Especially on the older versions, the limited number of well-developed third-party plugins is problematic for efficiently developing a well-functioning website.
Versions of movable type which didn't allow pages to be constructed were difficult to create continuity in design and easily editable pages for our editors.
The installation process could be simplified to make it easier for those new to a CMS to install.

Likelihood to Recommend

Movable Type allows for great flexibility, and would be great for creating a large, multi-page, multi-purpose website. I would not advise someone to use Movable Type if they are just creating a simple 3-page portfolio website. The time to construct the site compared to the return investment of content in the end, I don't see as being worth the effort. But a fully dynamic site with many variables, is definitely one that I would recommend using Movable Type as the content management system.

Kurtis Amundson

Website Developer at Amundson Studios (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

Easier to use and to customize products available for your users

Rating: 3 out of 10

April 30, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The organization I was with used Movable Type for blogs written by students and faculty. It was used by the whole organization, though it is now being phased out. It addressed a need to communicate about class projects in a blog style format.

Pros

Once you understood how the MT language and framework worked, customization wasn't too difficult.
Allowed for levels of user access.
Ease of creating RSS feeds.

Cons

Very clunky and out dated product compared to WordPress or Blogger.
Not user friendly. Required a lot of training.
Difficult for users to layout their blog entries as expected.
Difficult to upload images in a consistent format.
Features that never worked consistently: password protection.
Blog frequently went down.

Likelihood to Recommend

It was the only blog software we were allowed to promote for official use.

Michelle Belmont

Web Specialist in Marketing at Anoka-Ramsey Community College (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

GTD: Gets Things Done

Rating: 7 out of 10

April 22, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

When I worked at a newspaper, we launched an entertainment website that functioned as an arm of our entertainment section. It was used by about a dozen people, who essentially functioned as bloggers. So basically, we were using it as a content management system. I also seem to recall that the newspaper used Movable Type to make posts to the news side of the website. We all had our own logins and would schedule postings to particular parts of the entertainment website and the newspaper site. I would characterize our use as departmental, specifically from an editorial perspective.

Pros

It provided easy management of blog postings. I was able to set up content early and schedule my posts for a later date.
The interface was user friendly so you don't need to spend a lot of time in training. I was able to figure out a lot of the product on my own.
You could assign different administrative privileges to certain people. This means that certain people could only post to certain modules.

Cons

While it's beneficial to be able to assign administrative rights to a user so they can only post to certain places of a website, I can recall that Movable Type did not inform general users of the types of privileges they had. So, for example, when I knew I needed to make a posting to a certain area, and was unable to do so, I was not informed that I did not have access to make that posting. It would have been helpful for Movable Type to post a message on the screen, saying that I needed more permissions. This was very frustrating, especially when I was on deadline for a newspaper story.
Unfortunately, (or fortunately), I do not recall other negative experiences. I thought it was a pretty clean, friendly interface.

Likelihood to Recommend

Know who your users will be. Are they tech savvy? Do they know HTML? Do they need access to HTML or style sheets? If so, make sure that the access Movable Type provides is enough for your administrators/users. I think Movable Type does a good job of finding a middle ground. You don't really need to be an expert in HTML. It seems to be a good product for people who are professional communicators-- such as journalists.

Verified User

Contributor in Social Media (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

First Experiences With Movable Type

Rating: 8 out of 10

April 9, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Movable Type is used by the Office of Communications Division at Oberlin College & Conservatory. As a student blogger, we utilize the program to manage the Oberlin blogs for all contributors--students, admissions people and past bloggers. It helps us to effectively address a social media presence issue as well as helps Oberlin to successfully market its breadth of student perspectives while begin something fun and easy to engage with.

Pros

I like that there is a quick post option-- in the event that I ever need to post a blog quickly, I can do so.
There is an autosave function! One time, I mistakenly worked on a draft and did not save it but the server (thankfully) auto-saved my work and placed it in my draft box for me to return to later.
The preview tool truly comes in handy with assessing formatting issues, spelling errors and other proofreading necessities.

Cons

I would love to see more streamlined features for my writing-- like a smoother toolbar for bolding, underlining and italicizing things.
The work screen can often be very bland, I would enjoy seeing different ways of customizing my screen.
I would appreciate having a sidebar that shows me quick options (how to insert images, how to reformat lines, etc.) because it would make my writing process go a bit faster.

Likelihood to Recommend

Personally, the key question to ask about Movable Type is its reliability in terms of delivering the services that you expect it to deliver. In my experience with Movable Type, I have had no severe complications that make me view the product as inefficient or unreliable. I have always been able to accomplish my tasks and have the server do what I need it to do. Which is wonderful in my job and overall!

Verified User

Contributor in Social Media (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Movable Type Review and Evaluation

Rating: 6 out of 10

April 8, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I primarily used Movable Type when I was performing free lance web designing. I would use it at the CMS for clients so they could easily modify and add content on their sites without having any coding experience. I used Moveable Type over its competitors because it was more open to modifications and customization. It was very easy to template and depending on how proficient your PHP and SQL skills were, you could make the platform do anything you wanted.

The man issue I had was implementing the dynamic page load portion of it. I couldn't get it to work so many of my pages were loaded statically. The issue with this is some of my site's typical side bar content (ex. Recently posted....) content was not updating. I also used the system on a site that grew to about 800+ pages. This resulted in build errors and system errors.

Pros

Very easy to theme.
The control panel is simple enough for the basic user to figure out
Very easy to add plugins and more complex code.

Cons

The actual plugin website seems out of date and not well maintained.
The system seemed to crash for much larger sites (800+ entries).

Likelihood to Recommend

If someone was well versed in PHP and SQL, I would recommend building a system from scratch. If they are more comfortable using a system then can customize, but that has the backbone already created, this would be a great tool. If they have a very limited knowledge of coding, I would recommend Wordpress just due to the more available plugins and templates.

Joffroi Holcombe

Sr. Test Engineer in Research & Development at Huawei Devices USA (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

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Reviews and Ratings

Movable Type great for small sites on shared environments.

Rating: 7 out of 10

May 8, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

Renders one or more static pages per node/content item. Static pages are better for high traffic sites because dynamic sites do not always properly implement caching and are more likely to fail from needing a constant database connection.
Out of the box, the custom fields in Movable Type are much more intuitive to work with than Wordpress and other blogging platforms. The custom fields even work better than some dedicated content management systems such as Joomla. Custom fields can be defined for several different entity types such as content and taxonomy. The fields show up in the new content form and are easy to find and use.
The templating language in Movable Type is extremely rich and has many nice features built in. There is less of a need to extend for further templating functionality and you can also add some of your own PHP to the mix to add more features.

Cons

The installation of Movable Type still needs improvement. I've had to learn quite a bit about setting up my own apache servers in the past, but most of the needed modules for Movable Type come preinstalled nowadays with many server stacks.
The customization of the backend is much more complicated in comparison to Wordpress or other content management systems. It is difficult to rebrand the backend interface without hacking core files.
The licensing of Movable Type is confusing, keeps changing and now you're unable to get an open source version of MT6.x.
Movable Type could use its own command line utility like Drush for Drupal.

Likelihood to Recommend

Dennis Dewey

Web Developer in Professional Services at Digital Designs (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience