Probably the most important element to maintaining a web site with Movable Type (or other CMS) is the database. If something happens to the database, you're in trouble. If you keep backups (and you should!) you can go back to the last copy. But how old is that - a week? A month? Nightly, automatic backups of your database are the best way to handle such a problem.

So, for a little while I was searching for a good way to make nightly, automatic backups. I've found a good, free tool for the MySQL databases I use: MySQL Database Backup. Setting up the script as a Cron job let's me make nightly backups, and the script can be set to keep as many nightly,...

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Backup/restore your MySQL database

Backing up your database is an essential part of a healthy Movable Type maintainance schedule and critically important any time you endeavor to upgrade your system.

You can back up and restore a MySQL database in one of two ways: • Via phpMyAdmin • Via the command line

Backing up via phpMyAdmin

phpMyAdmin is the most popular web-based interface to MySQL and is usually preinstalled in most shared hosting accounts. Through it, you can perform any action on the database including backups and restoration.

To back up your database, open your...

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Backup/restore your BerkeleyDB database

Backing up your database is an essential part of a healthy Movable Type maintainance schedule and critically important any time you endeavor to upgrade your system.

Backup/restore via FTP

BerkeleyDB stores your database in a number of files within a particular directory that you've specified in the mt-config.cgi. You can backup your database by downloading the entire database directory in binary mode.

To restore the database, simply remove the current directory from the server and reupload the backup in binary mode.

Command-line backups

...

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Template Backup and Refresh

Each new version of Movable Type brings new features and, often, new template tags which are required to surface that new functionality on your blog. To aid in the process of upgrading your templates to the latest version, we have included the Template Backup and Refresh plugin.

There are two different ways of operating this plugin as described below.

Refreshing a single or selected multiple templates

To refresh a limited number of templates, go to the weblog template listing containing that template (or multiple). Check the checkboxes for all...

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Backup/restore your SQLite database

Backing up your database is an essential part of a healthy Movable Type maintainance schedule and critically important any time you endeavor to upgrade your system.

Downloading your database

Since the SQLite database is a simple file, backing it up is as easy as downloading it and saving it to a safe place. The file path and name is listed in mt-config.cgi just in case you forgot. Just make sure to download it in your FTP software's binary mode.

Command-line backups

If you have shell access, you can simply make a dated, compressed copy of...

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Question

How can I back up all of the data in my MySQL database?

Answer

When using MySQL for your database, you can export the entries, comments, templates, and all settings into a single file.

Using phpMyAdmin

If your host has phpMyAdmin available on your server, you can use this tool to export your database. • After selecting your database, click the Export link. This should bring up a new screen that says View dump (schema) of database (or something similar).

• In the Export area, click the Select All link to choose all of the tables in your...

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Updated

Occassionally databases get corrupted, servers fail or web hosts go out of business. So it's a good idea to back up your Movable Type blogs. There are many methods for doing so, a few of which I will cover here. The back-up process is much easier if you are using MySQL as your database, which, by the way, is one good reason to use MySQL over the default Berkeley DB.

TypeMover

TypeMover is a new plugin for the purpose of backing up, restoring, and/or migrating your Movable Type weblog. It is compatible with MT3 and later versions of Movable Type. From the TypeMover website:

TypeMover is a MovableType plugin. It adds backup, restore and migration features that let you get...

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Question

My database has been corrupted. Is there any way to avoid losing my data?

Answer

This answer depends a great deal on the level of corruption, the type of backups you have, and how much information is still accessible from within your existing installation (as opposed to being in external files such as the static pages Movable Type has generated from the data).

Does your host maintain backups for your account?

If so, do they have any which would include copies of your database files prior to the time corruption appears to have occurred?...

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Problem: Dreamweaver 4 falls short in its ability to produce well–formed, standards–compliant markup. Solution: You can easily harness Dreamweaver's two greatest strengths, its flexibility and its user community, to make it one of the best tools on the market for producing good XHTML. This article will tell you how.

With a few tweaks, hacks and extensions, you'll be able to produce sites that validate, and to clean up legacy pages. Set aside an hour or two, follow these directions, and fall in love with Dreamweaver all over again.

What this article does not do

This article does not show how to tweak Dreamweaver to produce standards–compliant...

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Upgrading Movable Type

Problem

You want to upgrade the Movable Type software.

Solution

Upgrading follows nearly the same steps as installation except that you will want to perform a backup of your system before attempting the upgrade. If you are upgrading from Movable Type 3.1x or before, you will also want to migrate to the new configuration file: mt-config.cgi.

Discussion

If you're on any past version of Movable Type, version 3.2 offers a lot of features and improvements that will make managing your blogs easier. To take advantage of them, you'll need to install the latest...

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•

01: Installation and Upgrade

• Introduction • Choosing the Right Weblog Platform • Finding Perl on your Server...

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Lesson learned: remove, don't rename.

Don't ever rely on security through obscurity, they say.

You know, they might just be right.

I'm giving TSEP a try to replace the limited Movable Type search box currently driving this site. Not only is it picking up all sorts of old archived files I had completely forgotten about, my heart absolutely sunk as I realized I had turned on PHP parsing just before it ran across an archived file that runs this little snippet of code: $queryWipe = "DROP TABLE IF EXISTS submissions"; $queryCreate = "CREATE TABLE submissions ( submissions_id mediumint(8) NOT NULL auto_increment, name varchar(48) NOT NULL default '', email...

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Discussion cross posted on Movalog and Learning Movable Type

One of the key features that Six Apart promotes about Movable Type is MT's ability to publish dynamically. What is dynamic publishing? And what are the benefits (and downsides) to dynamic publishing over static publishing?

Elise Bauer, editor of Learning Movable Type and Arvind Satyanarayan, author of Movalog, discuss some of the pros and cons of dynamic publishing. Non-techie luddite-wannabe Elise shies away from anything that seems like it might not be worth the effort and so far hasn't even tried dynamic publishing. Plugin creator and MT hack-master Arvind has embraced dynamic publishing with his usual boundless...

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Discussion cross posted on Movalog and Learning Movable Type

One of the key features that Six Apart promotes about Movable Type is MT's ability to publish dynamically. What is dynamic publishing? And what are the benefits (and downsides) to dynamic publishing over static publishing?

Elise Bauer, editor of Learning Movable Type, and Arvind Satyanarayan, author of Movalog, discuss some of the pros and cons of dynamic publishing. Non-techie luddite-wannabe Elise shies away from anything that seems like it might not be worth the effort and so far hasn't even tried dynamic publishing. Plugin creator and MT hack-master Arvind has embraced dynamic publishing with his usual boundless...

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Moving your Movable Type blog to a new server or to a new host is much more perilous than you might think. If not done properly, you could lose all of your entries. I recently went through this exercise and what saved me was a set of instructions from MT user Russcam. What I've done here is reworked Russcam's instructions for what worked for me with moving a site with multiple MT blogs. In some cases in this document I copy his words, word for word. I may get skewered for plagarism here, but I hate PDFs and need a web-findable record of what I did. This is essentially Russ's work, with my tweeks and ammendments. Please leave comments, questions, or proposed amendments in the...

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A new release of MT-Notifier is available. There is little to no functional improvement in this version of the plugin. If you already have the plugin installed, you may want to skip this upgrade. At the same time, there are some cool new features, so you may want to pick it up. It should be painless to upgrade MT-Notifier for those who are already using it.

There were some invalid tags in the template for MT-Notifier. I think I've fixed them all, so they should be XHTML-compliant now. Please let me know if you find this to not be the case and I'll give it another shot.

I've added the long-rumored auto-hack feature to the manual mode menu, which means you don't need to get your...

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Movable Type is the premier weblog publishing platform for businesses, organizations, developers, and web designers. Powerful customization gives you control over everything you publish and the elegant interface keeps things simple and clear.

Features

• Unlimited Blogging

Movable Type offers the ability to publish an unlimited number of blogs quickly and easily through a single installation of the application. And the platform supports posting by as many authors as you need, with no limit on the numbers of entries, comments, or TrackBacks the system supports. • Powerful management...

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The default Movable Type MT3.2 templates come with a sidebar on the right side of the Main Index page, but not on any of the individual entry, monthly, or category archive pages.

There are two basic ways to add a sidebar to archive pages. The easiest for beginners is just to copy and paste the existing sidebar code into the correct place in the archive templates. The slightly more involved, but much preferable method is to create a separate file with the sidebar code and use a PHP include or an MT include to include the file into the various templates. You can also very easily move a sidebar from the right to the left side of your weblog pages.

Where is the Sidebar Code?

The MT3.2 stylesheets and...

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Exporting your Weblog Entries

Problem

You want to make a backup of a weblog's entries, comments and TrackBacks.

Solution

Click the Export Entries tab of the Import/Export screen which can be reached via the Import/Export button on the Weblog Toolbar.

Discussion

Exporting your entries from Movable Type allows you to keep personal backups of your blog entries for safekeeping. This exported content is suitable for importing back into the system via the import mechanism. (See Importing Weblog Content.) In addition to exporting your entries for backup purposes, you can also use...

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In MovableType, I have always found it annoying to have two clicks to get to the trackbacks, but the comments were available from the first page after login.

Therefore this hack. I wanted to add a 'trackback' link to the homepage.

To do this, in your installation, find the directory movabletype/tmpl/cms

Look for the file list_blog.tmpl

Back this up - if in the command line, type cp list_blog.tmpl list_blog_backup.tmpl

Then in the file; find the line which reads:

<TMPL_IF NAME=CAN_EDIT_ENTRIES> <li><img alt="<MT_TRANS phrase="Comments">" src="<TMPL_VAR...

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