Movable Type 3.1 will offer more to non-developers than 3.0 did

The release of Movable Type 3.1 is currently scheduled for August 31:

• Dynamic PHP publishing, controllable on a per-template basis: You can control whether you publish a dynamic or static page on a per-template basis, letting you balance the publishing and traffic for your weblog. For example, high-demand documents like XML syndication files can be static, for maximum speed and lower server load, and individual post archives can be dynamic, eliminating the need to rebuild pages when making a global template change. [Very interesting… I’ve been trying to get a grip on how to use PHP to exploit the underlying mySQL database more cleverly –xian]
• Post scheduling:
• Subcategories:
• Application-level callbacks: (allowing plugins to hook into events like rebuilding and extend them).

In addition to the above features … a plugin pack for Movable Type 3.1, [including] Plug In to Movable Type contest [winners]:

• MT-Blacklist: a comprehensive spam-blocking and management system for comments and TrackBacks, with an advanced interface and remote importing of blacklist entries.
• XSearch/Plus: A system which allows you to plug in alternate search engines for Movable Type. This includes a working implementation of a powerful Plucene-based search engine.
• KoalaRainbow: A visualization engine for Movable Type which uses its own query language to generate graphics based on arbitrary queries of data in your Movable Type system.
• MultiBlog: A plugin which allows you to include template content from one weblog in any other weblog in your Movable Type install, including full control over whether an update in one blog should trigger a rebuild in another.
• Markdown: A simple text markup language which allows you to create posts in plain text and have them display in semantically correct valid XHTML. [Question: will this help with email-to-blog and blog-to-email character-set issues? –xian]
• Notifier: An email notification system which lets your readers subscribe to be notified whenever an individual post, a category, or even an entire weblog is updated. There’s also a complete system for managing subscriptions.

This release of Movable Type is currently scheduled for release on August 31.

Anil, we need to talk about some kind of “evangelist” pricing tier….