Good news for the Movable Type user community: As of last week, Movable Type 4.2 Release Candidate 1 is now available for download. Movable Type 4.2 is intended to address some of the most common pain points users face: search speed, template management, and anti-spam functionality for blog comments.From Byrne Reese's post on the Movable Type Community Blog:

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:

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• 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.

That's compelling news on the speed and performance front.

As for template management, Movable Type 4.2 will allow administrators to fully preview new templates before pushing them live. In addition, the template management screens been revamped and consolidated to make it easier to see what templates are available.

The third major improvement is the introduction of integrated anti-spam capabilities powered by TypePad AntiSpam. TypePad AntiSpam is a module used to reduce or eliminate spam in blog comments, and early impressions of the tool have been positive. Both TypePad and Movable Type are owned by Six Apart, so it makes logical sense for both services to share the functionality.

Movable Type expects that Release Candidate 1 will undergo about two weeks of testing before the second and final release candidate is made available. Assuming about the same time line for testing RC2 and we could be looking at the official release of Movable Type 4.2 in the late June/July time frame.

We'll continue to track progress and follow up with more news once 4.2 is officially released.