Community Solution
Manage your entire community and site on a single platform.
Create vibrant online communities with Movable Type Community Solution (MTCS). MTCS is a proven platform used by some of the biggest blogs and community sites on the web to help attract a larger audience, increase engagement, power forums, and improve community loyalty. Combined with powerful content management (CMS) features, MTCS allows you to manage all of your site's content, blogs and social media in a single open, unified system.
Movable Type Community Solution is the only platform designed to enable rich social media features while still meeting the needs and expectations of publishers. With Movable Type Community Solution, every site can be a complete community.
View Movable Type Community Solution Screencast
Features
Open Social Features
Movable Type Community Solution's exclusive Action Streams let you plug in to the rich social networks your community already uses. Display activity from dozens of social networking platforms right within your site. And get the best OpenID support, direct from the company that invented it.
Member Registration and Profiles
Build a membership base with Movable Type or synchronize with your existing registration database. Every member of your community can create a personalized profile page. And built in reporting tools let you generate reports about community activity. Profile pages can include whatever you need:
- Personal profile information, such as a photo, interests, or location information
- A list of comments submitted by that user and comment responses
- A list of recommended posts, forum threads, and comments by that user
- Customizable profile data or user data that you define
Forums
Forums reimagined for Web 2.0. With MTCS Forums, you can launch rich forums with the click of a button. Members can participate in your forums using the same profile and avatars used throughout your site.
Community Blogs
Allow your members to easily create their own posts with Community Blogs. The Community Blog gives your members the power to author their own posts and have other members comment on them.
Friending and Following
Community members can designate other members of the community as friends, or select authors on your site whom they'd like to follow. These relationships can be displayed on member profiles, and this relationship data is available to site administrators with appropriate permissions, who can view a member's connections across all of your blogs and sites.
Avatars and Userpics
Users can upload images of themselves or avatars to their profile pages. Their avatars become their identity on the site and are associated with their posts, forums and comments.
Custom Fields
Integrated Custom Fields unleash the full potential of Movable Type as a content management system (CMS), giving you the ability to define additional fields. In addition, Custom Fields allows you to customize entries, categories, authors while still keeping the authoring experience simple.
Recommendations
What is your audience interested in right now? Let your users vote on posts and comments they like by clicking the "Recommend This" link. Recommendations also act as a great way to encourage casual visitors to become members of your site -- it's "Digg in a Box" if you want to mimic the voting features of popular content-sharing sites.
Sort-by-Popularity
Show your readers the content that receives the most recommendations over the last day, week, or all time. Your community can assist your editorial team in discovering and promoting the best content on your site, increasing the value of archived content and encouraging exploration of additional pages.
Templates and Styles
Creating new templates has never been easier. Launch a Classic blog, a Community blog or a Community Forum simply by selecting the appropriate template in a drop-down menu. The templates automatically set up the fields and layout needed to get you started.
Backed by Six Apart Services
Many of the biggest blogs and community sites in the world weren't just built on the Movable Type Community Solution, they were designed, implemented and deployed by Six Apart Services. Our Services team has more experience succeeding with social media than almost anyone else, and powering your site with Movable Type Community Solution has even more potential when paired with the expertise of our Services team.
FAQ
What is the Movable Type Community Solution (MTCS)?
The Movable Type Community Solution is a complete, out-of-the-box social media solution that lets site owners deploy community-oriented web sites, including forums, community blogs, and user-generated content communities, with just a few clicks.
How is the Movable Type Community Solution different from Movable Type?
The Movable Type Community Solution builds on top of the Movable Type 4 platform and extends Movable Type functionality with advanced community management capabilities such as user profiles, avatars or user pictures, favoriting or user voting, reader contributed content, community blogs and forums.
I'm already running Movable Type. Can I upgrade to the Community Solution?
If you are already using MT4, then you can purchase the Community Solution as a standalone component that extends an existing Movable Type installation.
Are there professional services available to help me make the most out of Community Solution?
Yes, MTCS comes with priority support, which includes guaranteed response times and access to an account manager and support personnel. In addition to Six Apart support, Movable Type has a worldwide network of professional Consulting and Developing Partners who can help you get the most out of the Community Solution.
How do I purchase MTCS?
Please complete this form so we may provide you with a custom quote for Movable Type Community Solution.
What if I want an individual feature of MTCS, but I don't need integration, advanced capabilities, priority support or an account manager?
You may be able to find individual community features in the Movable Type Plugin Directory which meet your needs. These plugins are created by independent third parties, but offer some great features for simpler needs.
What are the key features in MTCS?
Reader Features
- Member Profiles: Registered members of your community can create and customize profiles
- Avatars or User Pictures: Members can upload an image of themselves to identify themselves on their comments, posts and profile
- Favoriting, Recommendations and User Voting: Your community can vote for its favorite content, making it easy for your readers and authors to see what's most popular
- User-Contributed Content: Registered users can submit content to your site, and administrators have full control over what gets published
- Community Blogs: Exclusive new community blogs designed to allow any site visitor to become a contributor to your blog
- Forums: Powerful but simple full-featured forums completely integrated with your blogs, user profiles, and content management
- Comment Feeds: Automatic comments feeds for your site and for each topic, blog post and/or profile.
Administration Features
- Custom Community Dashboard Reports: Easily monitor activity across your entire network of blogs and forums using dashboard widgets for key metrics
- Custom Fields: Customize the forms and fields for entries, pages, folders, categories, and users, storing exactly the information you need
- Globally Shared Templates: Maintain a consistent design and make changes across all aspects of your site
- Customizable Login and Registration Forms: Completely customize every aspect of your site experience, including all the registration, login, password recovery screens and more.
- Customizable Email Templates: Every email that Movable Type sends to your community members can be completely customized
- Customizable User Profiles: Decide exactly what profile information you want to collect from your users using a simple user interface
Requirements
Community members on sites powered by the Movable Type Community Solution can use any common operating system, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, and any standard web browser, including Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari.
Movable Type Community Server runs on a web server platform, and has the same core requirements as Movable Type 4. The Movable Type platform has been is routinely tested on, and is supported on, the following operating systems:- Windows XP Professional, Service Pack 2
- Windows Server 2003, Service Pack 2
- Solaris, SunOS
- Linux flavors:
- RedHat Enterprise
- CentOS
- Fedora
- BSD
- Mac OS X
Perl and PHP
Movable Type supports Perl version 5.8.1 or above. Movable Type will run on any platform that supports Perl version 5.6.1 or later, but only Perl version 5.8.1 or above are officially supported by Six Apart. Perl execution under fastcgi is both supported and recommended. Movable Type's optional dynamic publishing capability requires the use of PHP. Movable Type 4.0 supports both PHP4 and PHP5, but PHP is not required for core platform features.
Web Server
Movable Type requires any recent web server capable of hosting and executing CGI scripts. These web servers are officially supported by Six Apart:
- Apache 1.3x
- Apache 2.x
- Windows IIS 5.x
- Windows IIS 6.x
Note: Movable Type does not currently support execution under mod_perl with Apache 2.x.
Database Requirements
Movable Type 4.0 and greater has built in support for the following database servers:
- MySQL 4.0 or greater
- PostgreSQL 7.x, PostgreSQL 8.x
- SQLite
Movable Type 4.0 may be compatible with other versions of these databases, but only the versions listed above are officially supported by Six Apart.
Note: MySQL 4.0 is supported, but version 4.1 or greater is recommended as 4.0 is no longer supported by MySQL.
Movable Type Enterprise Solution provides additionally supported databases, including Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle 10g.
