MovableType

Lessons learned from a challenging Movable Type upgrade

page icon Jun 21, 2006 | 1 | MovableType + Tips

As Ramit mentioned, I helped him upgrade his Movable Type blog and things did not go as smoothly as expected.

Ramit was running an older version of Movable Type and drowning in spam comments. I helped him upgrade to the latest MovableType version and get those spammers under control and learned a few things along the way.

Comment spam is worse than I thought

I knew comment spam was a problem, but I hadn't experienced it much myself. Iwillteachyoutoberich.com is a very popular blog and it attracts tons of spammers. There were 6500 comments in the system when I started and after purging the obvious spam only about 1900 legit comments remained.

The latest version of MovableType (3.2) has much better spam control built in. So far it seems to be catching most of his comment spam automatically.

Don't use Berkeley DB with Movable Type

You can power MovableType with mysql, sqlite, or Berkeley DBs. Berkeley DB is the easiest to setup, but the hardest to maintain and upgrade.

I ran into all kinds of problems trying to upgrade from Berkeley DB to mysql. (And I'm not alone.) It is also almost impossible to move a Berkeley DB from one server to another. Hope you don't mind being locked into your current hosting provider! :)

If you expect your blog to be around for longer than a year or expect more than a couple hundred entries and comments, do yourself a favor and start out with a mysql database or upgrade now!

Don't rely on MovableType import/export

The import/export feature build into MovableType should not be relied upon for backing up or migrating your blog (at least in the current 3.2 release).

The import/export button does not export all of your data. If you export your blog and import it somewhere else, you will lose some information like base names, moderation status, and authenticated users. The biggie there is base names.

It means that your entries will probably have different permalink URLs after they have been imported. This will break any links that are pointing to your site and could kill your search engine ranking.

The safer way to backup or migrate is to use mysql database dumps. (I told you that you want to use mysql!)

Lessons learned. I'm just glad we were able to get Ramit's site back up and running so he can get back to writing!

How to install the MultiBlog MovableType plugin

page icon Apr 9, 2006 | 3 | How To + MovableType

David Raynes has created a slick plugin for MovableType called MultiBlog that allows you to publish entries from one blog in another. Unfortunately, the documentation is currently a bit thin. It took me a while to get it working, so I thought I'd share it with you all.

These instructions only apply to version 1.1.1. Version 2.0 is on its way and should be simpler.

  1. Download MultiBlog
  2. Upload the files to your web server
  3. Run 'chmod 755' on all of the files to ensure they have the proper permissions
  4. Place the files in the following directories (where mt is the full path to your MovableType installation):
    • /mt/multiblog-config.cgi
    • /mt/plugins/multiblog.pl
    • /mt/extlib/rayners/MultiBlog.pm
    • /mt/extlib/rayners/MultiBlogPlugin.pm
    • /mt/extlib/rayners/MultiBlogApp.pm
  5. If everything is working properly, you should see the new plugin in your MovableType plugin page.
  6. You can now publish entries from one blog straight into another blog. Here's an example: 
    <MTMultiBlog include_blogs="2">
  <MTEntries>
    <p><a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>"><$MTEntryTitle$></a></p>
  </MTEntries>
</MTMultiBlog>

Be sure to check out David's support forums If you need additional help.

Enjoy!

Update: David has updated his documentation.

Also...

There are entries in lots of other categories.