We have about 200 bloggers and several dozen active blogs, including a hugely busy breaking news blog with 20 or more posts and many thousands of pageviews a day, many sports blogs and random others.

My job is to enable more function, and to display the results. I learned DOS, and I’ve learned the Template Tag language over the years — I’m a blogger and an editor, I understand syntax and commands.

Template Tags are the key to Movable Type. It can do amazing things, but you do need to learn how to describe what you want in an ordered way. Once you get the hang of it, there’s a lot of, “Maybe if I do that… yes!”

In the trenches of a large news organization, producers don’t usually have many tools; new features require requisitions, priorities reviews, approvals, days. You will get a tool that does only exactly what you request. To change it, go through the process again.

MT blogs can be quickly created (cloned), changed and repurposed on the fly by nonprogrammers.

Otherwise, more than half of our list of built-in items are included in a free account or as free plugins to your MT site.

Themes are available and they are lovely, but there are few of them. Another main criticism of the MT content management system software is the image uploading is complicated even with a plugin. If you’re planning an image-heavy site, this may not be the best fit for you.

Some users criticize the way MT publishes – by republishing everything when you make a design change (this is considered ‘static’). Others consider this a great piece of flexibility – the static publishing means the CMS has an able cache program “out of the box” so if your database server goes down, these static files still work. In reality, MT is capable of static, dynamic and background publishing, with the default set to static. This can be changed.