why I dislike movable type
It's not as much to do with MT itself (I actually think it's nice and easy to use), as it is my dislike of six apart and how they conduct their business. The whole free, no-longer-free, free-again licensing fiasco aside; I have to say that six apart's delivery of MT sucks, at least from an administrator's point of view.
Like any other public-facing software package (read: potential compromise point/attack vector) on my server, I keep track of updates to movable type. Although some new versions are just feature-releases, there are a fair number of important security fixes that must be addressed. For most software packages on my server, I rely heavily on announce-only mailing lists to find out about security-related releases, and to a lesser extent, on RSS feeds and webpages. When I started looking for a movable type mailing list, I came up empty handed. I eventually found one hosted at sixapart.com, and I signed up. To make a long story short, the list turned out to be defunct, even though it was still active on their website and accepted new subscriptions. I emailed the list owner about the list, who happened to be one of six apart's co-founders, but never received a reply.
So, in order to keep track of updates to MT, I have been watching two different sixapart.com pages/blogs. I have the movable type news page, and the movable type pronet blog both bookmarked (and I get their RSS feeds) because sixapart posts so much crap to both pages that I easily lose sight of release announcements. Sadly, there does not seem to be a simple webpage at sixapart.com that tells me what the current version of MT is, and what changes (esp. security fixes) it contains.
A further hindrance is the fact that sixapart makes people login with a typepad account to download even the 'free' versions of MT. Therefore I can't easily go to the download page to check the latest version, nor can I easily actually download a new version to the server when necessary.
Some MT users might counter that new release notifications show up within the MT admin interface itself. Yes, I have seen these once or twice; but I am not an MT user, I am the server administrator. I have no reason to be logging into MT, and it's ridiculous to expect the MT users to notify me if they happen to notice that MT is telling them about an update. If six apart would use the stupid mailing list they set up, or maintain a simple security/version status page, it would be a lot less annoying to maintain Movable Type.
