The MT Community Solution
I should have waited another day before I posted my Newsworthy Link Dump last week. The following day, Six Apart announced the release of their Community Solution for MT.
As most Six Apart announcements, it got picked up by a number of tech news sources like TechCrunch and CNet.
I thought it kind of odd how these articles pidgeon-holed the Community Solution as forums. The Community Solution does indeed provided the ability to host forums using the MT engine, but it does a lot more too.
The screenscast on the Community Solution product page does a good job of explaining all that the community pack can do in a short period of time. CMSWire did a more through review here. Also, Jesse Gardner of PlasticMind posted his first impression of the Community Solutions.
Prior to the release of the Community Solution, MT Product Manger, Byrne Reese posted a summary to one of the semi-public MT venues the community frequents. (I recall where I got this from now.) It’s the best textual summary I’ve seen encountered and thought I would re-post it here.
The MT4 Community Solution is an add on to the base MT4 personal/commercial editions you can get today. Here is an excerpt from some documentation currently being developed:
Reader Features
- User Profiles - allow your users to publish a simple profile highlighting all of their various contributions to your site
- Avatars or Userpics - allow your users to upload an image of themselves to identify them on the comments and posts they leave behind
- Favoriting or User Voting - allow your users to vote for their favorite content
- Reader Contributed Content - allow for your users to submit, and optionally publish, content of their own
- Preconfigured Solutions for a “Community Blog” and “Forums” - easily deploy a blog with all the community features you want, or a forum in just a few clicks.
- Comment Feeds - publish comments feeds for your site and for each topic, blog post and/or profile.
Administration Features
- Dashboard Widgets - easily monitor activity across your entire network of blogs and forums using dashboard widgets
- Globally Shared Templates - make changes across all of the blogs in your entire system by editing templates that are shared and included across all of your blogs
- Customizable Login and Registration Forms - completely customize every aspect of your sites user interface by wrapping your brand around every screen, including all the registration, login, password recovery screens and more.
- Customizable Email Templates - completely customize the messaging found in the emails sent by the system
- Customizable Profile Meta Data - determine the profile information you want to collect from your users using a simple user interface
- Custom Fields - build out your own data model by customizing all of the fields associated with pages, entries, comments, folders and categories.
Why Use the Community Solution?
First and foremost, the Movable Type Community Solution allows companies to easily:
- create a place where communities can take root.
- foster a communities’ growth.
- monitor and manage the members of a community.
- promote a healthy and vibrant environment where communities can thrive.
But more than that, the Movable Type Community Solution allows companies to:
- easily extend your brand across all aspects of your presence online - use a simple framework for publishing web sites, blogs, forums, and more.
- manage all of your content in one place - don’t rely on different and disconnected software packages to manage your content online, managing all of your content from one place
- get the benefits of single sign-on - by using the same system to manage all of your content your publishers and readers instantly get the benefits of single sign-on, by not having to remember one login for commenting on your blog, logging into the administration interface, or creating a discussion in your forums.
- create best of breed forums - instantly deploy forums that take the best that blogs and forums have to offer.
- increase reader engagement - deploy features to your blog and web site that make it easier for your readers to engage with your content and your company.
- create more advertising inventory - edit and customize every screen and email sent by the application to create more advertising inventory for your company.
It is important to note that the features found within MT4CS will not be open source in the near future. Keep in mind that it has always our plan to have features found in our premium software packages to eventually make their way into the open source product.
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