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.

Today we're announcing a partnership with Zemanta whereby the Zemanta editorial assistance tool will recommend content to you as you write your blog posts. The tool is built in to version 4.32 of MovableType, so if you are a prolific blogger who produces a lot of content on a regular basis, you'll find this feature very helpful.

Many of you have likely heard of Zemanta, and perhaps some of you already use it as a plug in to your Firefox browser or other online tools. Using Zemanta is sort of like having a content servant at your elbow suggesting ways to make what you're writing more interesting and compelling through photos, videos, related articles, and useful tags.

Need a photo to match a post you're writing? Zemanta to the rescue. Like to be reminded to tag your post so that it's search engine optimized? Zemanta will help you out. Zemanta has indexed more than a million top media sources and quality blogs, including Wikimedia Commons, Flickr and various stock photo providers to make it easier for you to create compelling posts.

You can see what else Zemanta can do for you if you go to this FAQ page on their site.

We hope you'll download 4.32 and give it a try. And then tell us what you think.

If you're going to be in the Boston area at the end of this month, plan to stop by the Harvard Faculty Club in Cambridge to attend the Gravity Summit Social Media Marketing for Business Conference, which will be held on August 31.  Six Apart is a Media Sponsor, so we are offering a discount to the conference to members of our community. There are just a few seats left, so sign up soon.

Hip Hop entertainer and Twitter personality MC Hammer is the keynote speaker. See more details on our main Six Apart blog.