Movable Type: Upgrading from 2.64 to 3.3 on 1and1.com
When I wanted a photoblog 3 and a bit years ago there weren't a whole lot of viable options but out of this small field Movable Type was king. Successfully installing it on my host made me feel like a real geek. Learning how the templates worked and actually setting something up that looked half-decent took a couple of weeks more but I quickly came to value the flexibility Movable Type allowed.
With some tweaking it made a powerful photoblogging platform. I've since set up Pixel Post for my wife's photoblog and I appreciate how simple it is to setup and get going but it just can't do some of the things I've set up in my own photoblog (conditional category tags, etc.). I've also found Movable Type powerful beyond typical blogging fare;
- Making a simple site for family and friends to follow our yard remodel last year was a matter of a couple of hours, effort
- A collection site for my camera collection and equipment reviews required a little more thought but works amazingly well.
- I just spent many hours creating a site for our home owner's association (don't ask) that consumed way more time than I anticipated but should be able to grow and evolve easily in the future.
All of this is possible if you think of Movable Type as a simple content management system (CMS) rather than just a blogging application - more on this another time. In fact, the only thing I don't use Movable Type for is blogging - that's what Vox is for isn't it?
But all has not been sweetness and light. Back when I installed Movable Type (2.64) comment spam quickly became a huge issue. I don't think a blog is a blog (photo or otherwise) if it doesn't allow comments so turning off comments for all posts was not an option for me even though I received 30+ spam comments for every 1 genuine reader comment. Movable Type itself didn't do much to combat spam so we users had to install a third party pluggin the most popular of which was MT Blacklist. Blacklist was better than nothing but it just couldn't keep up with the spam my site received - the list itself would get too large and cumbersome, slowing things down. With more modern versions of Movable Type making BlackList redundant, even the developer abandoned it.
I dislike moving for the sake of it but I finally admitted that it was time to upgrade before I got so far behind the curve there wasn't an upgrade path. I went to the Six Apart site and downloaded the latest version of Movable Type (3.3). I was extremely happy to see the licensing agreement back to the old days/ways for us personal users but I was still apprehensive about upgrading. I remembered how much fiddling it took to get the installation up and running in the first place and I anticipated wasting at least the same time again. I was not disappointed.
The initial upgrade instructions I found basically said:
- Back up your database
- Back up you files
- Ftp the new software to your server.
- Run the new version of Movable Type and everything will be fine and dandy.
Hmmm. It sounded too easy. I was. I have a lot of time and data invested in my old MT instance so the first thing on my list was to backup all my data, as instructed. That went OK ... in theory. All I now needed to do was upload the Movable Type program files ... again, in theory. I was using the FTP program provided and recommended by my host (1and1) called Wise FTP. All went well; the files were copied into place but then, when I tried to run Movable Type my installation was inoperable. I must have missed something. I searched around some more and found more comprehensive installation instructions. I needed to create a new configuration file and be specific about which files were ftp'd in ASCII and which in binary. No problem - I followed the new instructions through twice, The first time, the installation was still inoperable, the second it half worked. I got an upgrade message and some half rendered administration screens. I tried to fix things by ftp'ing everything again - by the time I went to bed my half working installation was totally buggered again and I was fearful that I had lost 3+ years of data.
Refreshed, the next evening I started again. I followed in installation instructions but still no dice. I started ftp'ing the installation file by file and directory by directory to try and make sure that files were being overwritten on the server and been copied over in the correct mode. By the time I had finished the installation was half working again; comments were available on my sites and I could see one administration screen although I could not get to any of my blogs through it. I started to compare the files on the server and my local disk at a byte by byte level. Interesting; even though I had specifically told Wise FTP to overwrite the existing file in the correct transfer modes many of the files had different byte sizes - very different. I started to distrust Wise FTP so I fired up the portable version of Filezilla from my thumbdrive.
An hour later, with the files re-ftp'd using a different program my issues were resolved and the stress of losing my sites over. One thing I did find, though, was that I had 49k trackbacks from the previous 3 years that I had never done anything with. This was just too huge a number of records for Movable Type on my host to deal with. Luckily I know databases as they've been a large part of my bread and butter for the past 16 years. Deleting all that spam directly was the work of a few moments and a simple SQL command so that everything could be working as designed.
So my MT blogs are back baby, and better than ever. I promise I won't leave it 3+ years before upgrading again and I'll let you know how the updated software does as my new CMS platform and with spam. Early impressions are that it was worth the pain and that 3.3 is a huge improvement.
