Movable Type 5.02 was released by Six Apart today. This is strictly a bugfix release without new features. It contains fixes for a number of issues including one security vulnerability. It is highly recommended that all users of Movable Type 5.x upgrade their installations, especially the ones with multiple users.

Details about the issues that were fixed can be found in the release notes.

You may note that the release notes are unusually long this time: the focus of this release was on fixing as many bugs and issues as possible before working on new features for the coming releases (we will tell you more about these soon). We would like to thank everybody in the Movable Type community who submitted bug reports, feature requests and other feedback. Your efforts have made this release possible!

Downloads

• Download Movable Type (Open Source)
• Download Movable Type Pro

(What is the difference?)

Installation/upgrade instructions

• Installation guide
• Upgrade guide

Note: if you purchased a Movable Type license you can also purchase our installation or upgrade service and have all the work done by our excellent support team.

Found a bug? Need a feature?

1. To avoid duplication of efforts, search existing bugs or feature requests (from the feedback page) before submitting a new bug.
2. Head over to the bug report/feature request form and let us know!

conference caused quite a stir yesterday.

Mark Zuckerber described this as a technology that pulls together all the different social networks to create a web "that is smarter, more social, more personalized and more semantically aware"

Like Six Apart, Facebook realize the role of networks and connections in the discovery of new things. As more and more content pours onto the web our ability to efficiently navigate it becomes increasingly important. Facebook’s assertion is that you are going to be more interested in the things your friends, and others you are connected to, are interested in. We think they are bang on.

Blogging is a great networking tool that allows you to build a community around your passion, hobby or business, but why isolate that community and your content? We’ve been building features to help customers drive community and link it into social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Yesterday Facebook made this a whole lot easier. Six Apart's focus on community and social media resulted in Facebook selecting TypePad as an official launch partner for this announcement. Today we released Facebook “Like” to members of our beta team for testing and feedback. We have already seen some great integrations
as well as a ton of positive feedback on the Everything TypePad blog.

This move by Facebook brings endless possibilities. We'd love to get your thoughts on how you think it will impact blogging.

We’re pleased to announce the availability of Movable Type 5 in the US and Europe today.

Movable Type 5 takes a new approach to social publishing by starting with a website and adding blogs. This is in response to an increasing number of customers who've added their Movable Type blogs to existing websites, or who've used the Page feature to assemble a full website with blogs to quickly and easily update their content.

Movable Type 5 is designed to make it easier than ever to build an integrated social presence on the web, complete with an all-in-one social website.

The goal of Movable Type 5 is to give businesses, organizations and individuals a single, unified software package with integrated website and blog capabilities.  It's been enhanced for the easy creation, administration and management of websites and blogs - all from a single user dashboard.

Here are some of the new and improved features in MT5:

• A new user dashboard for both the website and blogs. This makes it easy for authors, editors, designers and other publishers to easily navigate between the two.

• A new theme mechanism that makes it easy to apply a new theme across a website and blogs with a single click that proliferates changes throughout the published site.

• Enhanced content management features that include revision history and new custom fields. There are five new object types for custom fields: website, blog, comment, template and asset.

If you haven't had a look at Movable Type 5 yet, please give it a try and let us know what you think. If you have questions, you might want to check the Pricing and Licensing FAQ or the newly refreshed and enhanced user documentation.

A note to our Movable Type customers who use plugins: Because of UI changes in Movable Type 5, some existing Movable Type plugins may not yet be compatible with Movable Type 5. Documentation on how you can update your plugins for MT5 is coming soon to movabletype.org. In the meantime, we hope you’ll have a look at MT5 and let us know what you think.

A note to our Enterprise customers: We will put Movable Type 5 under extensive scalability and performance testing before we release it in the Enterprise version. This will take several months, so we anticipate its availability later in 2010. Please contact your Six Apart Services representative if you’d like more information.

This morning we announced the public release of the TypePad Platform and APIs, which we hope will inspire a new generation of community tools such as TypePad Motion, a new open source microblogging application available today. You can  try TypePad Motion out for yourself or  go get the code and API access right now.

Since TypePad launched six years ago, Movable Type and TypePad have been sibling platforms that have developed in parallel. As of today, the opening of the TypePad Platform  means that Movable Type users and developers will be able to more easily take advantage of the new features and infrastructure improvements we're making to Typepad all the time.

We're excited to see the kinds of apps the community will develop using the TypePad APIs,  and we look forward to getting your feedback. Six Apart CEO Chris Alden posted about the significance of the TyepPad Platform  on the Six Apart blog today. Please have a look at his post for for a sense of his vision for Six Apart and for more detail about the Platform, the Developer Program, and TypePad Motion.