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.