Today is a great day for Movable Type users: We're announcing the release candidate of Movable Type 4.2, a new version which takes the top three most frequently requested features from our community and builds them right into the platform:

• A faster and more efficient user experience
• More design options and our simplest and most powerful templates yet
• The best, most effective anti-spam solution

So today we are incorporating all of the work that's been done on the MT 4.15 betas so far and are happy to announce the availability of the first release candidate of the newly rechristened Movable Type 4.2.

A Faster Movable Type

Speed isn't just about making the code faster, it's about looking at the tasks you do every day and making them all more efficient.

• Refined navigation - The primary navigation for getting around Movable Type has been refined and expanded to make getting to the page you need to far more efficient. Fewer clicks means faster blogging.

• Template Preview - Now you never have to wait to see what your site will look like when you tweak or edit your templates. Every Movable Type template can be previewed with a 100% accurate live preview before you actually make changes live on your site.

• Redesigned Template Management Screens - Movable Type's template management screens have been consolidated onto a single screen to not only make navigation simpler, but also to make it easier for you to get a more comprehensive view of all the files their installation publishes.

• Completely Rewritten Search - Movable Type's venerable built-in search system has been rewritten from the ground up to be modernized, much more flexible, and lightning-fast. Now it's easy to create custom-filtered views of your content.

Let's not kid ourselves though, speed is also definitely about making the code faster. To that end, Movable Type 4.2 has incorporated a significant number of enhancements focused on improving the raw performance of the application. And it's worked: Common tasks in Movable Type 4.2 are up to 100 times faster.

To measure our progress in improving performance, we ran our own benchmarks internally against a blog with 3 authors, 3 categories, 10,000 entries and 100,000 comments -- a site that's bigger than 99% of the blogs out there. The results surprised us all:

• Search performance was increased by two orders of magnitude! Yep, that's a 100x improvement.
• Simply upgrading from Movable Type 4.1 to 4.2 can increase publishing speeds by 33% and with module caching turned on the performance increase leaps to over 45%.
• Movable Type 4.2 out of the box is twice as fast as Movable Type 3.36 was out of the box; and if you turn on module caching, Movable Type 4.2 is nearly three times as fast as MT3.

Movable Type 4.1 Release Candidate 1, I upgraded this testing blog.