Category: MovableType stuff

Got beta 5 of Movable Type 4 up and running. So far so good. All the issues I was having with beta 3 have been taken care of and I haven’t run into any significant new ones yet.

There are a few changes that need to be done to my existing templates to keep them working, but those are mostly related to renamed Javascript functions. Otherwise migrating over with my existing templates should be pretty painless.

The default templates that come with MT4 are very different from previous MT templates. I haven’t had a chance to go through them all yet, but everything has been made more modular, which should make things easier to troubleshoot. It does increase the complexity and number of templates and modules to deal with though.

MT4 is a little more sluggish compared to MT3 when moving around in the back end. I suspect some of that can be alleviated if I moved to a mod_perl or mod_fcgi environment. Didn’t have much luck with doing that with MT3, but support for them is supposed to be better in MT4 so maybe I’ll give it a try again.

Depending on how beta 5 goes, I might go ahead and migrate the blog over to get a better idea of how things go in the real world.

Update: The MTEntryIfComments plugin seems to have broken with b5 with the following error on rebuild:

Parse error in template ‘Main Index’: <MTEntryIfComments> at line 129 is unrecognized.

Fortunately it can be easily worked around by using a

<MTSetVarBlock name="comment_count"><$MTEntryCommentCount$></MTSetVarBlock>

<mt:if name="comment_count" gt="0">
...
</mt:if>

type of construct, but now I’m finding that MTEntryCommentCount always evaluates to 0 in beta 5. Didn’t notice if this worked before, but I submitted a bug report so I should find out soon if it’s a problem with me or with MT.

After futzing about with MT4 doing various things to see what I can break, I’ve got it settled down using my current set of templates. Everything seems to be working fine on the front end. There are still a few issues with the back end UI that need to be ironed out, and a few issues that I’m working through to figure out if it’s a problem with MT or on my end.

Some of the things I’ve found so far:

• Display options settings in entry creation page don’t stick. Also doesn’t get settings from Preferences/Blog Settings/Entries (known bug)
• Preferences/Blog Settings/Entries: If I select All and then Save Changes, the selection reverts back to Custom.
• Basename text field is only one character wide
• JS dropdown menus drop down too quickly
• Would be nice if the publishing settings for a template could be set from the template listing page, rather than having to edit each template individually to set the publishing setting. i.e. Check the templates and select something like Dynamic or Static from the More actions dropdown
• Comments take a really long time to publish
• Name/email address fields don’t go away when a user is signed into Typekey like they do with my MT3.35 blog
• Autosave kicks in even when nothing has been changed

Finally got around to getting MT4b2 up and running on the server. It’s taken a few days for me to get the plugins copied over from the previous version and all the new default templates restored, but now everything seems to publish and work. I’ve got it running with a fairly plain default look right now.

There’s a lot of stuff in MT4 to wrap my brain around. The default templates have a new structure that give it much more of a programming type feel. Most of the tags look pretty much the same, so I probably could have gone with the templates I’m currently using, but I wanted to start off fresh to check out the new templating structure. It’s going to take a while for me to figure out, but it looks pretty cool. Very modular.

Not all the plugins I’m currently using are compatible with MT4, but none of the ones that don’t work are vital, so I can wait until new versions come out. I’m really digging the new UI. It has kind of a Vox-y feel to it almost. Lots of new features to investigate and check out.

It’s going to be fun to play with. MT4b3 should be coming out soon (tomorrow according to a recent email on the ProNet list). A little more testing and tweaking, and I think I might try switching over to the new version for some bleeding edge testing.

MT 4 is out a little earlier than I expected and is now open source no less (even more unexpected). I’m eagerly anticipating getting it running to kick some tires, but that will have to wait until next week when I get back. My new Fedora 7 desktop will make the perfect test platform too.

Tracked the problem with the Auto-save plugin to a browser issue. I suppose that’s what you get when you’re on the bleeding edge with Firefox nightlies.

Thanks to a fix from Patrick, the plugin works once again, although given the nature of the nightly builds, I wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up breaking again later on.

But for now it works and I’m liking it.