November 30th 2007 - Update
This project is now live and kicking at CMD
End Update

Six Degrees Creative, a superb design agency that I am currently doing a lot of development work with are very partial to Movable Type.

Having used it successfully on a blog project that had a Flash front end consuming various RSS feeds, we began tossing around the idea of using Movable Type as an XML generating CMS, that could be consumed by Flash and/or Flex.

We pitched the idea to a client looking for a content managed Flash site and a regular blog. The idea that with mininal overhead they could have their flash driven portfolio site and static html versions of all their content was a very attractive proposition.

A dedicated blog was set up to act as a CMS and through categorisation of this blog and some custom XML based Movable Type templates we are able to run the entire site and the blog out of the one Movable Type interface.

Movable Type's tag based templating "language" is pretty powerful and seems to do "most" of what is needed. We had to use the Custom Fields plugin to get the extensions that we needed but this still makes for a cheap CMS with very little developer time needed to get the CMS side of things all running. This particular Flash application was written in Actionscript 2 and relies on XPath to massage the XML once it is inside Flash. If a suitable project comes along the team would be really keen to see Flash Player 9 (Actionscript 3) applications use the new e4x functions to handle the xml in the client. No doubt that the performance gains would be noticeable.

Obviously this is not a CMS in the "proper sense" but if the application has fairly structured data that can be easily envisaged as a "blog post" (think Portfolio Item, Case Studies, Corporate News Releases etc) then this may be a solution for you.

This post will be updated as soon as the site is live.