Category: MoveableType

Movable Type: How to emulate an MTEntryIfNotExtended tag

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Movable Type has a built in container tag  

<MTEntryIfExtended>

which is often used to show the “More” part of a long entry, or anything else that should be displayed only if the entry is extended:

<MTEntryIfExtended>
    <$MTEntryMore$>
   <div>Special text or page elements for Extended Entries go here</div>
</MTEntryIfExtended> 

But what if you want something to show up only if the entry is NOT extended? There is no corresponding <MTEntryIfNotExtended> tag. 

Fortunately that functionality is simple to replicate using Movable Type variables.

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Slow Publishing in Movable Type caused by ImageValidate plugin

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This blog runs on the Movable Type engine, selected mainly because I like the fact that it publishes a static HTML file for each article.

For a long time, Movable Type appeared to be slowing down at publishing posts, particularly ones containing many images. It could take anywhere from a few seconds to five minutes or more just to publish an article! Yet when the images were not uploaded as Movable Type “assets” but simply added using HTML image tags, the publishing went much faster.

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Cleaning up and Preventing HTTP Injection Attacks

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I recently had the (undesired) opportunity to learn about HTTP and SQL injection attacks. It took a great deal of effort to diagnose and clean up, but hopefully what I learned from the experience may help you prevent these attacks on your own site or clean up after such an attack.

I first found out my site had been compromised because one of the subdomains started displaying “403” errors (permission denied) and one of the users notified me that the site could no longer be reached. At this time, the rest of the site seemed fine, so I had not noticed anything was wrong with it myself.

On examining the subdomain files, it turned out that the .htaccess file had some new directives written into it, which had the effect of blocking all access to the site. When I further examined the file, it appeared that the actual intent had been to redirect only the users that arrived at the site through a search engine, while allowing direct visitors to see the site as usual.

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Review of MovableType 3.3 so far

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I am happy to say that this site has been updated to the latest version of MoveableType with no serious problems at all.

Installation
My old templates all worked. The old database converted without any issues. Overall the basic installation took about 45 minutes, with me being extra careful and backing things up several ways.

Comments are back on!
The new comment features are WONDERFUL. I have turned commenting back ON and someone has already made a genuine comment! I feel like awarding him a prize! Of course there have also been about 150 junk comments, but they were easily disposed of.

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When MovableType won’t recognize ImageMagick

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Recently my web-host restored the server I use after some problems which necessitated wiping it and starting from scratch. After doing this my installation of MovableType was no longer able to create thumbnails. The thumbnail option no longer appeared in the upload dialog. When I looked at the config file, all the thumbnail options were commented out – in other words it was defaulting to use ImageMagick.

If you read the verbiage in that file carefully, which I did not, it says:

Specifies the image toolkit used to create thumbnails from uploaded images.
# By default, the ImageMagick library and Image::Magick Perl module are used;
# if your system does not have these, you can use the NetPBM tools instead
# (assuming that your system has these tools installed). Possible values for
# this setting are "ImageMagick" or "NetPBM".
#
# ImageDriver NetPBM

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