SIX APART IS FIXING FORUMS
Six Apart, which makes the Movable Type blogging platform and hosts the consumer blog sites Vox, TypePad, and LiveJournal, is releasing a new and very interesting update to its pro-level Movable Type 4 software: Integrated forums.
Context & Ripple Effects
The forums release is the second act of a strategy Six Apart laid out in June 2007, when it announced that Movable Type 4 would be rebuilt as a social media platform rather than a plain blog tool and open-sourced the code to win back developers. The company has history here: its earlier licensing reversal on Movable Type 3.0 is widely credited with fueling the rise of rival WordPress, so every MT4 feature drop is also a competitive statement.
Six Apart's reach spans the professional and consumer ends of blogging — Movable Type for power users and enterprises, plus hosted properties Vox, TypePad, and LiveJournal — and Reuters reported back in 2005 that even Yahoo was offering Movable Type to its bloggers. Adding forums natively pushes the pro product further from 'blogging software' toward a self-contained community suite.
First-order effects
- Site operators running Movable Type 4 no longer need to bolt on third-party forum software or bridge two systems' user accounts — discussion boards ship inside the same install, with shared authentication.
- Six Apart gives enterprise and community-site customers a concrete reason to stay on Movable Type rather than defect to WordPress, whose plugin ecosystem had been absorbing exactly this kind of functionality.
Second-order effects
- Standalone forum vendors lose the easy upsell of 'blog plus forum' sites, forcing them to compete on features a CMS bundle now ships by default.
- WordPress faces pressure to match integrated community features in core rather than leaving them to plugins, escalating the platform-versus-plugin arms race between the two rivals.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, publishing platforms converge into all-in-one community suites — blog, forum, and member profiles under one login — shifting competition from per-feature quality to breadth of the bundled stack and the lock-in that comes with it.
- Open-source distribution becomes the price of admission for pro-level platforms: Six Apart opened the MT4 code in 2007 specifically because closed licensing had nearly killed the product once before.
The trend: Blogging platforms are consolidating into integrated social-publishing suites where blogs, forums, and user communities share one codebase and one login.