Category: MovableType stuff

Updated to MT 4.2rc1 and already there are a few templates that need modification so excuse any breakage you might encounter (drop me a line if you do find some breakage).

Still digesting all the new things (never really did get around to digesting all the template tag changes between 3.3x and 4.1) and I still need to get around to mucking around with my templates so things build a little faster. From the looks of things, there are a lot of new things. MT’s templating system is has almost become a full-blown programming language in itself!

Crap, the blog archives are broken. Figures I’d find this out on the weekend. With the dog show going on this weekend I won’t be able to fix it until Monday. In the meantime you’ll just have to settle for the front page.

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.

I think I’ve managed to work out all the DB induced problems I was having, so after running the last few betas and RC versions without any problems on the test blog, I decided to switch my production blog over to MT4. The upgrade went off without a hitch and the templates rebuilt without any error messages. So far so good. I don’t expect any more breakage, and the known issues list has gotten pretty short now.

Haven’t made any changes to the templates yet, so the blog will look the same for now. Template work begins next. There are a lot of new MT tags that I’m interested in putting to work.

Everything should be functioning normally, but you discover anything broken, let me know.

Update: Excuse the breakage. I’m running into a few things with RC3 that I didn’t encounter with the test version.

• Error accessing the archive templates: Can't call method "archive_label" on unblessed reference at lib/MT/App/CMS.pm line 5692. Fixed after cleaning out the plugins directory, something I forgot to do earlier.
• Individual entry archives are broken: Smarty error: [in mt:355 line 170]: syntax error: unrecognized tag 'mttinyturing' (Smarty_Compiler.class.php, line 580) Fixed after removing the MTTinyTuring tag from the template. Hopefully a new MT4 version of the plugin comes out soon.
• Category archive dropdown list is gone from the sidebar
• Category archives are busted. The pages appear, but they’re either empty or there’s only one entry that shows. I bet it’s plugin related (catx.pl).

Well, it seems after years of schema upgrades, betas and life on MT’s bleeding edge in general, the schema of my MT blog DB is messed up and causes spurious errors with MT4 that nobody else can reproduce.

Update: Ok, managed to get things cleaned up enough for beta 6 to upgrade the database properly. Cleaned out a bunch of old unused and unneeded blogs along with cleaning up old junk out of the mt_templatemap and mt_template tables. Once I did all that, everything worked as expected.

So here’s what I tried.

Created a fresh new MT 3.35 database and used INSERT INTO [table “” not found /]
(...) SELECT ... FROM ... to repopulate the fresh database with the contents of the old one. But when I tried to get MT4 to upgrade the fresh database, I ended up with that same error at just before the end of the DB upgrade process

* Removing unused template maps…
Error during upgrade: Can’t call method “archive_type” on an undefined value at lib/MT/TemplateMap.pm line 99

Further attempts to get into MT just result in a blank error page.

So then I created a fresh MT4 database and use the same INSERT/SELECT method to copy data from the MT3.35 DB into the MT4 DB. This ended up being only partly successful. While everything appears to be intact, the dashboard is broken and the entry listing isn’t sorted by date. Ok, that’s fixed…the entry_authored_on and entry_authored_by fields weren’t populated. Filling them in with appropriate values seems to have done the trick.

Will be interesting to see what happens when I start messing with templates and rebuilding things.