Blog - Movable Type 3.2
Movable Type 3.2
After having been using Movable Type 2.64 forever, and especially with the license agreement changes that came with MT 3, I wasn't in a hurry to upgrade. Actually I first thought that my use of several a second "author" (account) for the moblog, which I created in order to not expose my admin account to a third party application (thing I prefer not to do no matter how I trust it) would go against their "one author" rule for the free package. I cleared this issue recently by contacting the sales, who replied:
Thanks for getting in touch. If you're the same person, I should think you'll only count as one author. Otherwise, you'd have multiple personality disorder on our behest, and that's no good. ;)
Glad that I fall in the first category, or at least I think so. :)
With the recent release of Movable Type 3.2 and especially with Six Apart's tempting 32 favorite features (still only 25 actually...), I just couldn't resist much longer. It's just a few days ago that I found the time to go through the upgrade process. It took a little while to backup, merge my config files and small changes I had done to the scripts, but once that was done I only had to upload and click one button, and the upgrade was done in a few minutes.
There are many new good things about Movable Type 3.2, and you can read in detail about many in "Movable Type 3.2: Our 32 Favorite Features", but my own favorite are probably the powerful junk comment/trackback detection and "junk folder" (goodbye MT-Blacklist!), and also the site-wide administration which will definitely save me a lot of time.
I was quickly reminded of another of the main reasons why I had avoided MT3 though... The great Mfop (Kevin Cameron's moblogging tool) doesn't support it. I will have to find another solution in order to moblog again (suggestions are welcome), unless Kevin would accept my proposition and let me update Mfop to make it MT3-compatible.
Update (02:07): I ended up with a solution for my moblog. I'm now moblogging through Flickr and using a local script to generate and cache a thumbnail, which is displayed using JavaScript (for users with it enabled) in place of the oversized Flickr thumbnail (just because I hate browser-resized images). I'd still prefer to use Mfop again though because it's templating is much more flexible. Now, off to bed!
Posted on September 29, 2005 at 00:04 | Tweet
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Glad you're enjoying the new software. We put a lot of hard work and thought into it and, you're right, it's a far cry from the 2.x series as many people have found out recently.
I too would like to be able to easily moblog via my MT install. We've been looking at ways to make that happen, but it's difficult to make it easy given the number of environments MT runs in (over 13,000). Still, you can bet there are a lot of people (including many who work at Six Apart) who want the very same thing.
Take care and enjoy 3.2!
Posted by Jay Allen on September 29, 2005 at 00:23
Thanks a lot for the comment Jay!
Indeed, it wouldn't be an easy thing to provide one moblogging solution for all. Flickr isn't far with the email upload support and auto blog posting, but the lack of template customization and also the fixed thumbnail sizes still leave a bit to be desired.
Keep up your great work!
Posted by Patrick on September 29, 2005 at 01:01
I downloaded 3.2 but haven't upgraded yet. The last few times I did I ran into a bunch of issues so I'm a bit wary. But since you didn't have any problems I think I will give it a try this weekend.
Backing up all the stuff is such a pain though..
Posted by Roy on September 30, 2005 at 09:31
Yeah I was expecting much worse. The only things I had to fix after upgrading were to make a "comment pending" template (cause I upgraded from 2.6x and there wasn't comment moderation back then) and also fix a few of my PHP scripts that query the comments table directly and ignored the comment_junk_status and comment_visible flags.
Especially since you upgrade from 3.x, it should really go very smooth.
Posted by Patrick on September 30, 2005 at 13:10
Roy, this document is your friend: http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/docs/3.2/01_installation_and_upgrade/upgrading_movable_type.html
:-)
Posted by Jay Allen on October 1, 2005 at 05:22