Six Apart is fixing forums
Six Apart, which makes the Movable Type blogging platform and hosts the consumer blog sites Vox, TypePad, and LiveJournal, is releasing a new and very interesting update to its professional-level Movable Type 4 software: Integrated forums.
There are other forums tools for sites and blogs (see Jive Software, for example), but the Six Apart product, called the Movable Type Community Solution, is the first that I know of that integrates this tightly into a blogging platform. With MTCS, users logged into the blogging platform for commenting will automatically have a login for a site's forums, and they will be able to manage their posts and monitor their feedback from a single location for all their activity on a site.
Not your father's online forum.
In an upcoming release, users will also be able to denote "friends" on a site and track the activity of those users. BoingBoing, a Movable Type blog, is using an early version of this feature.
However, since Movable Type is software installed separately by each blog publisher, MT blogs don't by default get linked social networks. If there are users you've marked as friends on BoingBoing, and they are also on Huffington Post, you'll have to mark them as friends again. Cross-site friending--and the rise of a de facto social network for blog readers--will come as Movable Type improves its login procedures. (But see also: MyBlogLog.)
Users get a unified control panel to see all of their site contributions and feedback.
Other social features in MCTS include voting and ranking, or "Digg in a box," as Six Apart VP Anil Dash described it to me. Dash also showed me a new administrator's control panel for the MTCS forums, so moderators don't have to do all their work in the forum's authoring environment.
I'm intrigued by the new integrated forums in Movable Type. Forums are hugely useful sources of information and community on many sites, but they are rarely well-integrated, easily managed, or indexed well by search engines.
The only bad news to this story is that the Movable Type Community Solution will cost about $10,000, on top of your Movable Type 4 software license. Dash hinted that we might see hosted versions in 12 months or so.
Rafe Needleman writes about start-ups, new technologies, and Web 2.0 products, as editor of CNET's Webware. E-mail Rafe. 
ExpressionEngine which is much better priced and much more flexible has had an integrated forum module for quite some time. EE has been a very good MT alternative (better IMO) though for some reason it does not get as much attention.
A forum is really not much different than a blog and comment system except that any user can create a post (start thread) and other users can comment (post to thread.) Because of that close functionality there has been some crossover from forum system as well.
For instance, I believe both Invision Power Board and Vbulletin (which are both forums systems) have also added blogging capabilities. The blogs I have seen in the wild from each of these still seem to have that forum feel though.
Even Wordpress has BBpress which is a light forum system. Joomla and Drupal also have forum modules available though I am not sure they are as slick as that which MT has just pushed out the door.
So really, MT is late to the party. Many other blogging platforms actually do have forum solutions so it was only a matter of time before MT would come up with something. I imagine this has not been a hugely requested feature in the past though. The majority of blogs have no need for a forum.
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