Late Tuesday night, Six Apart announced yet another revision to the pricing structure for Movable Type 3.0 licenses. The prices are lower, the licenses are less restrictive, and the range of options is far less confusing.
There are now four types of licenses--personal, commercial, education, and not-for-profit. Personal users have three options: free for 1 author and 3 weblogs, a basic supported version for $69.95 that supports 5 authors and unlimited weblogs, and an unlimited personal version for $99.95. This ought to address a lot of the concerns that people raised about the pricing structure (though, of course, it won't change the minds of people who've decided that free-as-in-speech software is a better option for them).
As an educator, I'm particularly happy to see that the educational licenses are spelled out clearly, and that an affordable option for a single professor is included in the mix ($39.95 for unlimited use by one teacher). That will make it much easier for me to continue developing and maintaining my MT Courseware package.
What I'd really like to see for educational use is a TypePad-style interface that allows easy blog creation by users at an educational institution. That would make a big difference in terms of institutional adoption.
At a BloggerConII session I mentioned that I felt the Content Manangement Systems are at the same place HTML editors were 12 years ago. There was no such thing as WYSIWYG for HTML back then just like CMS today.
There is way too much nuts and bolts stuff to do to get a post posted. I hope it doesn't take 12 years to get past this point.
Ya know, I was just thinking as I read the MT Educational License page this morning that an institutional site license for TypePad would be a groovy thing.
We're about to release a blogging template for SimpleSite, our ez web site constructor that's part of our home-grown Catalyst web toolkit that's available to all of our students, faculty, and staff here at the UW (see http://catalyst.washington.edu/tools ), but it's not as full-featured as TypePad (though it is integrated with our institutional infrastructure). I'd be happy to get you an account if you want to try it, Liz - I'd really appreciate your insight.