Solving technology problems, one at a time
Recently, my webhost enabled phpsuexec on the server, and several of the web applications on my site stopped working. Movabletype began rebuilding pages with the wrong permissions, so browsing an affected page would generate a
Continue readingI 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.
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 NetPBMContinue reading
A few days ago, I deleted 2 MovableType categories that did not have any entries in them. The next time I tried to publish an entry, I got this error:
Can't call method "label" without a package or object reference at plugins/sub_cats.pl line 67
It turns out that the Subcategories plugin could not deal with non-continuous numbering of category id’s. Deleting the two categories caused gaps at #3, and #11.
I did a quick search and came up with this page:
Comments on SubCategories version 0.2.1
Thanks to the helpful folks on the MoveableType support forum I now have a couple of ways to post code in my entries.
NOTE: because my new multi-column layout creates issues with form fields in Safari, I’ve also included links to download the code.
1. Install Brad Choates macro plugin, and use it to escape the HTML. Insert this into your templates:
CODE (or download it here)
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<MTMacroDefine pattern="m/[code](.+?)[/code]/si">
<pre><MTMacroMatch position="1" encode_html="1"></pre>
</MTMacroDefine>
I liked the page design of my php-based home page, and didn’t want to roll it into Moveable type. But I wanted a list of articles to appear, and update automatically as I add entries. Taking a cue from this tip on the Moveable Type support forum:
” Show related content from a blog on another’s page“,
in my blog, I created a New Archive Template on the template screen named “Category Links” with this in it:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="MT2blog/styles.css" type="text/css" />
<div class="categoryLinks">
<MTArchiveList archive_type="Category">
<$MTArchiveTitle$><br />
<MTEntries>
<a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>"><$MTEntryTitle$></a><br />
</MTEntries>
</MTArchiveList>
</div>
In the Weblog Config under Archiving, I checked Category and selected Category Archive (this lists all the entries by category).
In the Archive Filename line next to this new line, I added:
allcategory_links.html
This will be the name of the file generated by this archiving method – “allcategory_links.html”.
On my home page, I added this “include” to pick up that generated page:
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<?$filename="/home/server/path/to/my/MTarchives/folder/allcategory_links.html";
if (file_exists($filename)) { include($filename);}?>
Installing Moveable Type was one of the more difficult script-installs I’ve done. Perhaps a description of the problems I had with it might help someone else trying to install this otherwise terrific blogging software.
First, I didn’t understand the relationship of all the parts, and their locations. I found the instructions to be a little ambiguous for a newbie.
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