Movable type is the system of printing and typography that uses movable components to reproduce the elements of a document (usually individual letters or punctuation).
The world's first known movable type system for printing was made of ceramic materials and created in China around A.D 1040 by Bi Sheng (990–1051) during the Northern Song Dynasty (960–1127). In 1377, the first metallic types were invented in Goryeo Dynasty in Korea, which were used to print Jikji, which is the oldest extant movable metal print book. The diffusion of both movable-type systems was, however, limited. They were expensive, and required an enormous amount of labour involved in manipulating the thousands of ceramic tablets, or in the case of Korea, metal tablets, required for scripts based on the Chinese writing system, which have thousands of characters.
Around 1450 Johannes Gutenberg made a mechanical metal movable-type printing press in Europe, along with innovations in casting the type based on a matrix and hand mould. The more limited number of characters needed for European languages was an important factor. Gutenberg was the first to create his type pieces from an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony—and these materials remained standard for 550 years.
Movable Type is a weblog publishing system developed by the company Six Apart. It was publicly announced on September 3, 2001; version 1.0 was publicly released on October 8, 2001. The current version is 6.0.4.
Movable Type is proprietary software. From June 2007 to July 2013, Six Apart ran the Movable Type Open Source Project, which offered a version of Movable Type under the GPL.
Movable Type has several notable features, such as the ability to host multiple weblogs and standalone content pages, manage files, user roles, templates, tags, categories, and trackback links.
The application supports static page generation (in which files for each page are updated whenever the content of the site is changed), dynamic page generation (in which pages are composited from the underlying data as the browser requests them), or a combination of the two techniques. Movable Type optionally supports LDAP for user and group management and automatic blog provisioning.
Movable Type is written in Perl, and supports storage of the weblog's content and associated data within MySQL natively. PostgreSQL and SQLite support was available prior to version 5, and can still be used via plug-ins. Movable Type Enterprise also supports the Oracle database and Microsoft SQL Server.