Upgrading MovableType
I wrote a little while ago about customizing the "skin"---or look and feel---of my Photoblog 2.0. Recently I was confronted with a different task with my Googleplex Blog: upgrading from version 2.6 of MovableType to the latest and greatest version 3.31.
MovableType is the software that powers this blog. I upgraded not because I wanted some new bells and whistles (I tend to be pretty conservative about that kind of thing) but rather because I had to: security flaws in the old version had allowed some spammers to hijack the email notification system. Yuck! Why do people spend their time trying to hack systems? What a waste of time.
MovableType has moved in the enterprise direction, leaving your average solo webmaster to the wondrous delights of open source WordPress. So MovableType is now positioned as software to manage enterprise blogs---although they'll still let you download it for free for "personal" use.
As enterprise upgrades go, this one went pretty smoothly. I was careful to make backups of my server-side database, and to follow directions carefully. But, of course, the whole thing didn't work when I restarted it. And you get what you pay for: the free download personal version comes without support.
A little research showed that the problem was that I'd put my MovableType "static" directory within my web server's CGI bin directory, used to execute scripts, which is where my MovableType itself lived. Moving the MT static stuff out of there, and correctly pointing to it in the configuration files solved my problem.
I'm reasonably happy with the upgraded version, and I'm glad to have plugged my security problem. Personally, I still prefer WordPress, but I can see whay an enterprise running multiple blogs with multiple authors and a variety of editorial roles would want to manage them with MovableType.
More generally, I wonder about software getting more complex as it matures. Is it because there are more bells and whistles ("features") in successive versions? This process seems sort like the opposite of entropy, and yet related to entropy at the same time because of the chaos it throws into the lives of IT people who must cope with it.
Posted by Harold Davis at July 27, 2006 6:30 PM
