This is Nick, and I’m a Japanese web director and engineer.

Movable Type has really large share in Japan as a CMS software.
You can see an insight with Google and you’ll find there are lots of Japanese people who want to search for information about Movable Type’s tips and how-to.

http://www.google.com/insights/search/?hl=en-US#q=MovableType&cmpt=q

I am also using Movable Type with my job and developing website with it.

But now in Japan, WordPress is spreading and lots of people start to use it as a CMS.

I think that Movable Type is a good software, but it’d rather say that people tend to use MT for there jobs, not blogging.

Many people think that by virtue of making something open source, you will cultivate a community around it. The truth is that GPL is just a license. It doesn’t do anything by itself to encourage or assist in expanding and building a community. That rests exclusively upon the leaders of the project to engender its users with the values that they will help you propagate. And one of those values should be the community itself. And that is where Six Apart I think was letting the community down. They very much operated with a hands-off approach to the community maintaining an outward disposition of, “we will do our thing, the community will do theirs.”

*That* more than anything was at the heart of why the MT community forked MT to create Melody. The community ultimately did not feel supported. So we took matters in our hands.

And what is happening now is encouraging – the platform is evolving substantially to incorporate features and abilities to help address some of the underlying challenges of the platform: a perceived reliance on Perl to perform simple tasks. The truth is that no one actually needs to know Perl to build sites for Movable Type or Melody. That is to a very large extent a myth perpetuated by its critics and competitors.

That being said, there is some truth to it, which is what has given rise to tools like Config Assistant, Auto Prefs and the like which reduces much of the work typically reserved for plugins down to the simple task of editing a config file. If Melody is successful, it will have turned this perception around on WordPress by demonstrating that to build a site with Melody, not only do you not need to know the Perl programming language, but you don’t even need to know the PHP programming language — or ANY programming language for that matter!

Movable Type though is far from obsolete, or down for the count. It still has a dedicated and devoted group of engineers working on at Six Apart, plus a huge team of professional services engineers also working to make the platform more successful. And then their is Melody which we hope will be a positive influence within the entire Movable Type community – by creating a project whose purpose is more devoted to the needs of the community.

You should follow along with what we are going on http://groups.google.com/group/openmelody/ and see for yourself! If you wondered where the MT community went… they went to Melody!!

If you were to go to compete.com and enter in movabletype.com and even movabletype.org, you will see MT has almost flatlined for the last year or more. However, you do a check of typepad.com and there you go, HUGE!

It appears Sixapart is focusing and putting more effort into their typepad and MT is just something they are doing on the side for a tiny market. I have tried to light a fire under their butts that I would dedicate some time designing quality themes but they just didn’t seem to put effort in my offer.

Anyway, it’s a shame because I actually like MT and was about to launch a separate design site for themes but I just don’t think it’s worth my time if they won’t start marketing it to the typical blogger.