Movable Type is a blogging and content management platform written in Perl, first released in 2001 by Ben and Mena Trott. It was one of the tools that defined early blogging software, alongside Blogger and WordPress, and it still exists today under Six Apart in Japan.
What Movable Type is
Movable Type is a self-hosted publishing system. Unlike WordPress, it was originally built to generate static HTML pages from templates rather than serve pages dynamically on every request. Later versions added dynamic publishing as an option. It supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite as database backends, and uses its own templating language called MTML.
The software runs on a standard LAMP-style stack (Linux, Apache, Perl, and a supported database), which made it a common choice for developers in the mid-2000s who wanted more control over templates and output than the blogging tools of the time offered.
Licensing history
Movable Type’s licensing changed several times, and this history shaped its reputation:
- Early versions were free for personal, non-commercial use, with paid licenses for businesses and multi-author sites.
- In 2004, Six Apart introduced a new pricing structure that charged based on the number of authors and weblogs. The change was unpopular with the existing user base and pushed a visible portion of bloggers toward WordPress, which was free and open source.
- Six Apart later released Movable Type as open source software under the GNU General Public License, reversing course on the earlier restrictions.
- Ownership passed through several companies over the years, including SAY Media, before the Movable Type product and brand settled with Six Apart K.K. in Japan, which continues to develop and sell it.
That licensing dispute in 2004 is widely regarded as one of the events that accelerated WordPress’s growth, since it gave the emerging open source alternative a clear opening.
Content model
Movable Type organizes content around a few core concepts:
| Concept | Role |
| Weblog / Website | A top-level site or blog instance; a single installation can host several |
| Entries | Blog posts, similar to WordPress posts |
| Pages | Static content outside the blog stream |
| Templates (MTML) | Control layout and output, including static HTML rebuilding |
| Categories and tags | Taxonomy for organizing entries |
The static-publishing model is the main structural difference from WordPress. Movable Type can rebuild HTML files on a schedule or on save, which was originally a performance advantage on the shared hosting of the early 2000s, before server-side caching for dynamic CMSs was common.
Current status
Movable Type is still actively sold and maintained, primarily through Six Apart’s Japanese operation. It has a much larger install base in Japan than in English-speaking markets, where its usage declined sharply after WordPress became the default choice for new blogs and sites. Current editions are marketed under names such as Movable Type Advanced for commercial deployments, alongside a community edition.
For most people researching “Movable Type” today, the interest is historical or comes from maintaining a legacy site rather than starting a new project. Documentation, plugins, and community support are far smaller than the ecosystem around WordPress.
Running an old Movable Type site
If you inherited or still run a Movable Type site, the main practical concerns are Perl and database compatibility with modern hosting, and the shrinking pool of developers familiar with MTML. If you’re weighing whether to move content to a more actively maintained CMS, see the list of platforms covered on this site at /cms/supported-cms/.