Local Development: How to install Movable Type 4 on your local machine

Movable Type is a blogging engine developed by Six Apart (other notable Six Apart products are the hosted blog solutions Typepad and Vox).  The latest version, MT 4.1, is available under a range of licenses including free for personal use, education and non-profit licenses and commercial licenses depending on the number of users.  The release of MT 4 also saw the introduction of an open source licence available from the MT community at movabletype.org.

Written in Perl and supporting a number different databases, MT4 includes many of the features users have come to expect from a modern engine including themes (called “styles”), plug-ins, widgets, blog stats and multi-user options.  With the introduction of the open source licence, there is very little to separate Movable Type from its competitors such as WordPress, although WordPress seems to have a bigger community of theme and plug-in developers (or maybe I just don’t know where to look).

Below is a 17 minute screencast that demonstrates how easy it is to install Movable Type on your local machine for development and design purposes. Toggle the flash player to full screen for best results. As always, all comments are most welcome.

This entry was posted in how-to, tutorials and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.

8 Responses to Local Development: How to install Movable Type 4 on your local machine

  1. shane says:

    Hi Raghu,

    I’m glad it worked for you. I always have this paranoid fear that what works for me doesn’t work for anyone else. It’s nice to know when it helps out other people as well.

  2. thanks for the great video explanation

  3. shane says:

    No worries. I’m glad it has helped you out.

  4. daniel m says:

    Hey dude, nice but ,i have a problem:

    “Premature end of script headers: mt.cgi”

    I need install the other perl from xampp webiste….?
    :(

  5. vijay singh says:

    Hi ,
    i have a problem in installing MT on Windows Xp system.I am getting error “Premature end of script headers: mt.cgi”.Please help me to sort out this problem.

  6. An alternative to installing movable type on your local machine for evaluation, is an absolutely free service I’m making available online at:
    http://www.movabletypedemo.org/

    This service allows you to evaluate the latest version of movable type from each series to date, starting from v1.x.

  7. balakrishnajee says:

    Hi,
    This video helped me for local setup.

    ——–thank you.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *