No more free CustomFields for Movable Type users.

Published on 24 January 2008 in Web Development, Movable Type

Oh poop. It appears that, with the release of Movable Type 4.1, one of the most useful plugins I’ve ever found for Movable Type – CustomFields – has become part of the MT “Professional Pack“, which means buying a licence then. Especially annoying given in its pre-Six Apart ownership, it was essentially donation-ware for personal users.

In a way, I did expect it when the plugin was sold to Six Apart recently. It was quickly put into the commercial beta for 4.1 – I’d just hoped it would become part of the free version too. After all, it’s the plugin that takes Movable Type from blogging software, to semi-decent CMS.

And okay, I can afford the licence fee – however I’m an ideological git and was rather hoping to move across the various sites I look after, to the open source version with this release.

It seems a great shame that Six Apart have gone down this approach of having deliberately cutting off some seriously good functionality to the open source community, after taking the huge and monumental step to release the MT that way in the first place.

One can only hope that Six Apart have a change of heart down the line. And it’s got to be said that right now, the Professional Pack isn’t exactly the most enticing offer. Besides Custom Fields, there’s just a batch of templates. Well call me fussy, but I make them myself… Something I suspect the average professional would do too…