Please send me an e-mail at nashway@gmail.com with your contact information, and maybe we can do some work together. Thanks for your help!

Now, about static publishing: Trust me, I know what a great feature this is. It’s one of the things I tout when I talk to clients. I probably should have listed it in both pros & cons, or at least explained the con better. It’s more the perception users have that’s the problem, not the feature itself. Some users have trouble understanding why a widget that is updated on the home page didn’t automatically update on an archive page from 3 years ago.

I also know dynamic publishing is available, but I greatly prefer static, for all the reasons people have mentioned.

Thanks to everybody that posted about their own MT CMS setups, and to the 6A folks for clarifying some things I didn’t explain well.

As to your point about static/dynamic publishing, did you know Movable Type is capable of dynamic publishing too? All this requires is a small change in the publication settings of your blog, and you are done. You can even have dynamic and non-dynamic sites next to each other in the same installation.

Also, MT 4.21 has a feature called ‘High Priority Static Publishing’ which helps a lot in the ‘Instant Gratification’ department In summary, the main page and individual blog entries are published immediately, while the rest of the pages are being generated in the background on the server. This gives you the best of both worlds.

Originally we tried using http://wiki.case.edu but the staff who were inputting the content found it too confusing. So then we set up a blog in which we created categories and subcategories and added the relevant ones as links in the menu. The department found it very easy to add entries without knowing much HTML and http://blog.case.edu/community was the result.

It worked out quite well. We use it a lot to generate rss feeds and such but this was the most non-bloggy thing we’ve done with it so far.

Interestingly when Case chose MT as it’s blogging platform, the ability to produce static pages was considered a pro rather than a con. I think it was thought it would be more stable for robots indexing the site and also we wanted to ensure it produced logically named pages rather than weird things with numbers.

A couple thoughts:

Plugins – Movable Type could definitely use the plugins you describe, but I would also like to think that we are leader in this category as well. Action Streams is an amazing plugin, and while others offer life streaming plugins, none of them give you the amount of control or extensibility that Action Streams does. We were also the first to implement a Fire Eagle plugin for Yahoo’s location aware service, we were the only one demoing Facebook Connect on stage with Zuckerberg @ f8, we were the first to create a beautiful web interface for iPhone users, and so on and so forth. I have also found our developer community to be surprising large, however they also tend to be more modest and more focused on building sites for customers than proselytization.

Publishing – Movable Type is the only publishing system that supports static, dynamic and background publishing. We default to static publishing because it is the most reliable and stable. If you are a designer and want the gratification of dynamic publishing, then just turn it on. Its right there waiting for you. And then when you are done, flip the switch and make your site as reliable as reliable comes.

Finally, a word on multi-blog support – this is without a doubt in my mind, one Movable Type’s greatest strengths from a technical perspective. Movable Type was designed to support multiple sites from the day it was incepted. It power to aggregate content (entries, pages, categories, members, tags, anything) across any number of sites, and to do so reliably and quickly is a massive benefit. In this day and age, people don’t have just one web site – they have multiple: a blog or two or three, a web site, forums, etc. Treating each of those as a silo limits your ability to reach the people you care about.

Thanks again for the great feedback – keep watching us, MT is getting better and better every day. Movable Type 4.0 was just the beginning, Movable Type Pro made Community features the standard, and the next version will be setting news standards for others to follow…

Currently, I’m researching how to enable an “edit this” link when the user is logged into the site & is using static publishing … I’m leaning towards using this technique …
http://keithdevens.com/weblog/archive/2004/Apr/10/lazyweb.MovableType

I disagree about the publishing system being a con, it is a pro that gives great flexibilty as to how your site is served to users. With the built-in settings you can have publishing queued to spread the load, you can set specific templates to publish dynamically and even have modules built staticly as their own files then include them in the rest of your templates, meaning if you make a change to your header it is instantly available across your site without republishing everything. The static building means MT has a caching system out of the box, if your DB server goes down the static files still work.

I agree with all your other points though. Movable Type is definitely quite the player in the CMS market. Great post