Those of you who are running blogs on the Movable Type platform will probably be excited to hear that Six Apart has unleashed the MT4 Release Candidate. Here’s some of the goodies this new version of MT4 will bring with it:

• We incorporated over three dozen new themes built right into Movable Type because you told us how important a good collection of professional designs is.
• We bundled podcasting support into the core application and integrated it with MT4’s smart media library, to let you easily create podcasts, videocasts, or even photocasts from the content you upload.
• You told us you loved the WYSIWYG editor but wanted it to be even more meticulous about the HTML it outputs, to make sure it works correctly with your markup. Done.
• We iterated through a number of significant changes to the primary navigation of the application, refining each version based directly on user feedback and testing.
• We toiled over every pixel on the screen, revisiting each of Movable Type’s icons to make them clearer and more intuitive.
• New in this release is API support that makes Movable Type 100% compatible with Nokia’s LifeBlog application, allowing many users to blog directly from a mobile phone - without the need of an intermediary.
• And of course we fixed hundreds of bugs, many of which we probably couldn’t have found without the help of our beta testers. More often than not, you went the extra mile to collect data for us, help us in reproducing the bug and then verifying the fixes we provided. Thanks!

I’ve been playing with one of the beta versions on a test setup and I am impressed. This is what Movable Type 3 should have been when it was released so long ago. I’m particularly impressed with the built-in podcasting module as that’s something I’ve been interested in trying for awhile if I could ever think of something to bother making a podcast about and having it built in would increase the likelihood I’d try it out. Lastly the new WYSIWYG editor it has is just this side of perfect.

Supposedly MT4 has a built-in member registration system, but I’m not entirely certain I’ve been able to locate it. What I’ve found so far doesn’t seem like a user registration system to me and offers none of the member profile options that ExpressionEngine does. MT4 also continues to be this weird amalgamation of static/dynamic blogging. By default it wants to make static pages and the dynamic aspect still very much feels like it was tacked on to appease folks who wanted to use MT dynamically.  Overall this is a big step up from previous versions of Movable Type and folks who run MT are going to love it, but it’s still not everything I’d like it to be. I’ll be sticking with EE for the time being.