Since MovableType 4.0 went gold yesterday, I decided to roll out a new look for the blog (it uses the Hills Dusk theme from Style Catcher). I’ve been working on it since beta 5 or so, figuring out the new templates and working out how to incorporate stuff from the old design into the new template scheme.
I managed to salvage most of the blocks I had on the old site and was able to use a few of them with the new layout. There is still some style related tweaking I want to do, but everything seems to be working (if you encounter something broken, let me know). Having a strange issue with getting the category dropdown list working, so in the meantime there’s just a big long list of categories in the sidebar.
Known issues
- There’s a lot of inter-blog linkage that’s currently broken which is a side-effect of cloning the original blog. I’ll probably fix these on a ‘as I encounter them’ basis.
- Hitting the archives is slow. This is an inherent problem with the new archive templates and the amount of processing required to build them on the fly. The 5 year old computer I’m using for a server probably isn’t helping any either. A little bit of template reorganizing and optimizing should help out with the slowness.
- Category archives don’t show all the entries, which I suspect is related to the Entry Listing Default setting in Blog Settings. I’ll probably have to use a very large number for a lastn attribute to get all the entries in each category to show up.
- “Can’t call method “ping_url_list” on an undefined value at lib/MT.pm line 1459.” happens to me at seemingly random times when trying to publish a new entry.
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Congrats on the upgrade to MT4! I noticed that you mentioned having problems with archives being slow. I was wondering if there was anything I can do to help you out?
Byrne Reese
Product Manager, MT
Looks soooo much nicer than the last look.
Thanks Byrne,
I’m pretty sure the slowness is more an issue with the hardware behind the server than an MT thing. There are a few things bundled in the default templates that I don’t really need, so I think once I get to cleaning things up and optimizing the templates a little, generating the archives dynamically should get a little faster.