Movable Type Gets Its Social Network On – A Reason To Go Back?

Finally, an actual reason to use MT again?

Six Apart today announced new solutions that will enable businesses to build powerful social media and blogging communities on top of Movable Type 4.

The Movable Type Enterprise Solution enables companies to integrate their blogging and social media efforts into their existing IT systems. Expanding on Movable Type 4’s built-in capability to create and manage thousands of blogs and users, the Enterprise Solution’s LDAP directory server integration and support for enterprise-class databases– including Oracle 10g and Microsoft SQL Server – make it easier than ever to deploy and manage employee and departmental blogs.

The Movable Type Community Solution makes it possible to create a custom social media platform that can attract larger audiences, increase audience engagement, and improve loyalty. Where Movable Type 4 on its own allows for registering and managing site members, the Community Solution incorporates rich member profiles, member blogs, “Digg-style” recommendation tools and other features that help new and returning visitors engage with the site and one another.

I’ll tell you what. I used MT for years before switching to WordPress, and I wish I could have all of those years back. ReveNews was on MT when I took it over, and I can tell you it was a complete and utter pain to work in across the scale we had with the layouts/templates we had and I wanted. Honestly, I can say that if it was in WordPress I would have spent thousands of hours less working on it. Thousands and thousands.

But now MT might make a social network on top of the MT install, and that intrigues me enough to have another look.