Movable Type 3.1 is coming out on August 31 allegedly. There are a lot of nice new features that make it even more useful, especially in news publishing environments. More plugin extensibility, subcategories, and scheduled posting are definitely a thumbs up. TypeKey and a limited user model still make fighting comment and trackback spam harder then they need to be.
MT 3.1 is also going to support dynamic rendering, allowing folks to trade off between fast, reliable, static pages, and whizzy, fresh, but slower pages.
Great! Except for the choice of Php as the language for implementing dynamic pages, at least from a systems design perspective. There's already a perfectly good scripting language, Perl, that MT relies on and has a beautiful API that the system exposes. Any of a number of Perl based dynamic page languages could have been added. I know Php is sweeping the nation, but I can't imagine this makes product management any easier. And besides, while I really try to be language agnostic, Php just seems poorly designed , through and through.
That being said, I completely understand the business logic. Tons of hosting services are Php enabled. The Web design crowd has taken up the banner. The language bears a surface simplicity that makes it seem more accessible than Perl. The engine is open source and actively maintained. It's basically a manadatory checklist item.
Heck, once you start down that route, why not just go to a pure Php solution?!