The WordPress team had initially committed to maintaining the WordPress 2.0.x legacy branch until 2010. Unfortunately, we bit off more than we could chew—the 2.0.x branch is now retired and deprecated, a few months shy of 2010.

Many of the security improvements to the new versions of WordPress in the last couple of years were complete reworks of how various systems were handled. Porting those changes to the 2.0.x branch would have been a monumental task and could have introduced instability or new bugs. We had to make hard decisions between stability and merging in the latest security enhancements. Additionally, far fewer people stayed on the 2.0.x branch than we anticipated. I take that as a testament to the new features in WordPress and perhaps even more the features offered by plugins, many of which don’t support older versions of WordPress!

I’m disappointed that we weren’t able to keep the branch maintained until 2010, but since one of the big reasons for that failure was the massive scope of our security improvements for the newer versions of WordPress, 2.0.x doesn’t die in vain!

Today marks the official release of Movable Type 4.3. While we've been previewing the features over the last week, below is a hit list of the biggest features. If you're looking to download MT Pro, click here.

• Smarter Search and Pagination

  We've added several new ways to drill down your search (author, category and date), which lays the groundwork for the ability to paginate your index and archives. With a static first page and dynamic additional pages, your site gets the added page views with faster publish times. Additionally, we've added the ability to paginate comments, which will dramatically improve publish times on prolific comment threads.

• Entry Asset Manager

  MT's smarter than ever with the way it handles assets like photos, which means it's much easier to make slideshows and editing entries that use assets is even faster, with more control over your code. Read more »

• Summary Object Framework

  This is our first step in dramatically improving performance for our largest MT installations. This framework allows MT's core codebase and plugins to store arbitrary summary information in the database, replacing expensive calculation queries with fast primary-key lookups against summary tables. The framework includes a flexible mechanism for invalidating summary objects when the objects on which they depend are modified, and a queued worker class for asynchronously regenerating invalidated summaries. We'll be providing extensive documentation for developers to start implementing this feature in their installations within the week.

• Improved Documentation

  We've tested, rewrote, reformatted, consolidated, and provided basic and advanced tested examples for over 80 docs pages. We've also made it easier for community members to contribute back with a style guide and a list of pages that need attention. Read more »

• Smarter Blog Cloning

  Use any of your existing sites as a prototype for new ones by cloning just a blog's layout and design with a few clicks (which is especially awesome for blog networks). Read more »

• In-App Performance & Developer Features

  For those with thousands of entries, users or blogs, searching inside the app is much faster. Additionally, we've exposed some developer tools (e.g., Debug Mode & Performance Logging) in the settings for faster access.

For a list of all the additions in the release, please take a look at the complete release notes.

Download it Now!

You can download MTOS 4.3 now by clicking directly on these links:

• MTOS-4.3-en.tar.gz
• MTOS-4.3-en.zip

Thank you, MT Community

We want to thank you all for helping to make this release possible. Your help during the beta and the patches you have provided for this release are invaluable. We can't wait to hear your feedback on 4.3 and see all of the fantastic sites you've created.