Six Apart announced the latest version of their Movable Type software had been released. Version 4.0 has several features that look very interesting which is part of the reason why I decided to take the plunge and upgrade quickly. I’m not completely fearless though as I am not going to upgrade all of my blogs. I did start with the largest one though when I upgraded Diary of a Diehard. I think I should have had my head examined with that decision. It’s not that the upgrade was not successful, it is just that it has nearly 1,000 entries so the upgrade process has a lot of opportunity for failure. But I wanted to use the new CAPTCHA feature of Movable Type 4.0 and that was enough to make it worth the risk.
The upgrade was relatively painless. I followed the instructions and backed up the database and the files prior to starting the upgrade. Once the back-up was completed I deleted the MT directory and the MT-Static directory then moved the files across. At first I forgot to change the permissions on the .CGI files but after getting several error messages I quickly eliminated that problem.
When logging in the first time the MT.CGI file recognized that the database was still at version 3.35 and therefore ran the appropriate upgrade scripts to update the database tables and fields. When completed the software went to the new user interface which is substantially different than in version 3.35. It is definitely going to take me a while to find where everything is at.
The first thing I noticed was that the upgrade did not modify any of the template files leaving my blog in the exact same state as before the upgrade. This is both good and bad. The good of course was that the blog remained up and running without any problems. The bad is that the templates do not take into consideration any of the new MT 4.0 features. I rebuilt my site just to see if it would work.
I had one error with a ATOM Archive template that I have no idea why I was using. I deleted it and rebuilt again with no errors. I say no errors but that is not entirely the case. During the rebuild process the script timed out several times resulting in a 500 Internal Server Error. I think this has more to do with my hosting company than with Movable Type but it was still a pain. I had to reload the page when the error occurred but it did continue on so it was hassle rather than a show stopper.
The main goal with the upgrade was to use the CAPTCHA functionality for comments that is now built into the core application. I’ve spent 2 days on it and I am no closer now than I was before. The CAPTCHA code requires ImageMagik which is installed on the server but the CAPTCHA images do not show up. I am working with hosting company to make sure ImageMagik is installed correctly so time will tell. The comment code with the CAPTCHA piece is in a new Comment template so I am also going to have to change the site templates which is a lot more time consuming. The documentation around CAPTCHA is also a little light leaving out a lot of information that would be helpful for troubleshooting.
Overall the new system looks good but it is definitely more than a slight change and should be planned before it is executed.
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