MT 3.2 is out

Movable Type, the blogging engine whose hopelessness in dealing with spam drove me to use WordPress … has just had a major update. According to the features page (emphasis is mine):

Movable Type helps people connect to your weblog and to each other, using comments or TrackBacks. A powerful Junk Folder automatically keeps your feedback on-topic and constructive without imposing a management burden on the blog owner. There’s no spam on your blogs, by default. And you can let readers respond to individual weblog posts or manage content submitted through comments and TrackBack for all of your blogs at once.

According to Neville Hobson (via Weblog Tools Collection, via our WP Dashboards), the new edition is disappointing – apart from anything else, the documentation is incomplete. It will take an awful lot to win back people who’ve fled MT for WordPress – if indeed that is a good thing, given that Wordpress is a mature and reliable piece of software with distinct advantages over MT. What does MT actually learn from Wordpress’s success – does MT 3.2 have, for example, two-level word-based spam blocking?

I’m actually considering getting rid of my stale Drupal site and restarting Blogistan (the name people persistently give this blog, ignoring the title at the top!) as a Muslim group blog, with a UK focus (this after all has a .uk domain) allowing for occasional international contributors. (If you’d like to contribute, please email me … the address is at the bottom of the “About this blog” page which can be found on the left sidebar.) I’d like to at least try out MT 3.2, and that offer – the unlimited personal edition for $69.99 (£39.08 at current exchange rates) – looks distinctly tempting.

But there’s a problem. Six Apart has a UK site offering the unlimited version for … £54.99. You can buy the “Personal Edition”, for five authors and unlimited blogs, for £39.99 … that’s 91p more than the unlimited version from the US site. Is that offer not open to us Brits? Or have they just forgotten to update their UK site?