Movable Type 4
I’ve been running Movable Type 4 (which was released on August 14) for almost two days now, and of course you’re all wondering What took you so long, Mr. Still-Using- Movable-Type-When-Everyone-Else-Uses-WordPress?
Well.
I’m not one to move a dot zero version of anything into production, but in this case I had my reasons. When I moved to a new host a couple of weeks ago, I switched from using suexec to cgiwrap. Everything was fine except when someone posted a comment, and MT’s rebuild would fail with a permissions error. When a rebuild was invoked in this way, some script deep within the bowels of Movable Type was clearly not being wrapped, and because the web server doesn’t have permission to change files owned by me, it objects. (The comment was saved and a manual rebuild worked, but the commenter received a nasty error screen that made it seem as if the comment wasn’t saved.) While I was pondering this, MT4 final was released. It didn’t have this issue with cgiwrap, so I thought how hard could this be? And it wasn’t except for a small issue having nothing to do with Movable Type.
While Movable Type has a new interface and lots of new features, I didn’t see any that would let me eliminate any of the hacky stuff in my templates. The biggest disappointment was with the new Pages feature, which at first seemed to offer a way to manage static content and blog entries, but there is no integration between the two—a page can be either bloggy or static, but not both. I was able to move all my templates and handful of plugins over without much fuss with one exception: I couldn’t get the tag MTEntryPermalink to work the way it used to at all. It seems to want to point to the entry’s parent directory and not the entry itself. I was able to work around this, but it sure slowed things down. Anyway it is my sincere hope that in the aftermath of this rather significant upgrade everything on mere cat is exactly the same, except for some, uh, “pre-existing conditions” naturally. Please let me know if you find anything amiss.