Community Solution

Manage your entire community and site on a single platform.

Create vibrant online communities with the new Movable Type Community Solution (MTCS). With MTCS, you can attract a larger audience, increase engagement with your site, host forums, and improve the loyalty of your community. 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 unified system.

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Features

Member registration

Provide publishing privileges as a benefit of becoming a registered member of your site. Build a membership base with Movable Type or synchronize with your existing registration database. MTCS's built-in reporting tools let you generate reports about the activity of your community.

User Profiles

Every member of your community can create a personalized profile page. Standard Profile pages include the following content:

  • 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, forums, and comments by that user

Forums

Forums have finally entered the modern age! 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.

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

Fully integrated Custom Fields unleash the full potential of Movable Type as a content management system (CMS), giving you the ability to define additional fields and inputs. In addition, Custom Fields allow you to customize entries, categories, authors - almost anything - ensuring MT becomes a direct reflection of your site.

Recommend

What is your audience interested in right now? Let your users vote on posts and comments they like by clicking the "Recommend This" link. Recommend is an easy way for users to express their opinion without leaving full-fledged comments.

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.

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
    Note: Perl, PHP and web servers such as Apache HTTP Server are available for Unix-style operating systems such as Linux, BSDs and Mac OS X in addition to Windows. They are also freely available and offered by most Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and web hosts today.

    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.