When installing Movable Type for the first time, you have a choice of what database to use - MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, or the default - Berkeley DB. The recommended choice is MySQL for many reasons. MySQL is more stable, more powerful, more easily editable than Berkeley DB. With one simple command you can back-up your entire MySQL database (See Backing Up Your Blog). Many web hosts offer a cPanel or phpMyAdmin utility to manage your database, making it easy to make global changes to your weblog.

If you are using Berkeley DB and you change servers, or your host upgrades your server (this has happened to me twice in the last year), the version of Berkeley DB must be exactly the...

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While I haven't done a ton of Berkeley DB conversions for Movable Type, I am certain that if you are still on Berkeley, you should get onto a SQL pacakge pronto. This isn't to say that BDB is a bad product. Just that SQL is so much easier to administer when used with MT that it's not worth the effort of sticking with Berkeley.

As I was involved in the most recent of these projects, I ran into the age-old problem of too much data. The conversion just wouldn't run all the way through without losing data. Perhaps there are server tweaks that can make it happen. I don't know.

All I do know is that I could never get all of the entries to convert. Out of 1600 or so entries, I was getting...

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Question

Which one is better? MySQL or Berkeley DB?

Answer

If Movable Type has been installed, Berkeley DB will be used by default. This product is not a real SQL database, such as MySQL, or MS SQL Server or Oracle. It is not managed by a separate process. The client application - in our case this is Movable Type - will access the data by means of functions running in its own address space.

I have no detailed knowledge about Berkeley DB, but regarding architectural questions it might be compared to MS Access.

MySQL is a true database. A separate process will be executed on the server. All data access will not be done by reading and writing the data files directly. Instead,...

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Question

I'm using the Berkeley DB, and after changing hosts/servers, I'm unable to login because the new server has a different version of Berkeley. How do I convert the database files to the new version?

Answer

Converting the DB files over to the format used by the new library version can be accomplished in several different ways, depending on the Berkeley DB versions involved. The files that need to be converted are all of the files in your db directory whose filenames end in either .db or .idx (the .lock files do not need to be converted).

The following steps require...

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Question

How do I convert from one database type to another?

Answer

Convert from Berkeley to SQL

To determine whether your server supports a SQL database, and the Perl libraries required to connect to it, run mt-check.cgi and look at the status for any of the following modules: DBD::mysql, DBD::Pg, or DBD::SQLite. If any of these are installed, your server will support that version of Movable Type. If none of these are installed, you will need to contact your host to have them installed if you wish to use a SQL database.

If you are interested in...

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Hot on the heels of v1.0, here's version 1.1. The only new feature is the availability of dynamic tags, i.e. those of you that wanted to use MT Protect on dynamic templates now can!

Download MT-Protect_1.1.zip and follow the installation instructions. If you installed any older version of MT Protect, you will need to disable and re-enable protection on all your blogs via the global configuration so that the new files get downloaded.

The template markup is identical for both static and dynamic templates!

If you experience a bug or a problem, please file a ticket.

The campaign has not yet reached its target, if you find this plugin useful people consider donating to the campaign.

On a sidenote, Movalog is now...

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Configuring the System

Problem

You need to configure a Movable Type system.

Solution

Add to and modify the configuration directives in mt-config.cgi, the Movable Type configuration file.

Discussion

Configuration directives define the baseline information Movable Type needs to run in any given environment. These should not be confused with the system and weblog settings accessed through the MT interface. The configuration contains only the basic information that MT needs to get running.

The following steps detail the basic configuration each installation will initially need in...

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Tutorials in Alphabetical Order

"Email Me" Contact Forms A Safe Way to Upgrade to MT 3.2 Add Your Links Here Adding a Footer Adding a Sidebar - MT3.1 and Earlier Adding a Sidebar to the Default Archive Templates Alphabetize Your Entries Amazon Web Services An Overview of the MT Program File Directories Applying MT3 Style Templates to MT2.X Background Patterns Backing Up Your Blog Banner Images Blog Maintenance Blogger Audioblogging with Movable Type CGIWrap and suEXEC Category Archive Pages Category Customizations Closing Comments Colors - Background, Banner, Headline, and Font Colors - Experimenting With, Using MTSetVar and MTGetVar Combining Multiple Blogs Into One Concerning Spam Converting from Fixed to Fluid Style...

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In the early days of MT 3, when I had unreg'd comments set to moderate, I really wanted to have an approval all button as I would read the comment in the email notification I received. Since then that feature request has not progressed so I decided to take matters into my own hands. As the screenshot shows, at the end of this hack you will end up with two buttons on the comments listing screen. This buttons will allow you to mass approve/moderate comments by checking the boxes of the corresponding entries.

First of all open lib/MT/App/CMS.pm and find on approximately line 32 the following

'approve_comment' => &approve_comment,

and right after it

'approve_confirm' =>...

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Before you install Movable Type there are three fundamental questions you need to ask yourself, 1) should you really be using Movable Type as your blogging software?, 2) do you have everything you need to use Movable Type? and 3) should you do the install yourself or should you pay someone else to do it?

1. Should you really be using Movable Type?

As weblogs gain more public visiblity, more and more people are setting up their own blogs. Many turn to Movable Type as it is one of the more established and powerful tools available. Movable Type however requires much more technical expertise than hosted blog services such as Typepad and Blogger. The first requirement is that you know...

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Working with Style Catcher

With 3.2 came the very nice StyleCatcher plugin that allowed you to easily manage and apply themes or styles to your blogs. This tutorial will show you how to make your repository work Style Catcher. Note, this tutorial won't show...

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Posted on 10/22/2005 | Permalink | Comments (0)

CustomFields 1.12

UPDATE: I've just pushed out a silent update that fixes a problem with custom entry field descriptions not showing. Thanks Nilesh! A new version of CustomFields is available that fixes four bugs that people found;CustomFields...

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Smarty Docs

Now that Smarty is built into MT, you've got a whole load of new features that you can use. Just have a look at the documentation everything discussed in those docs are available to MT users, the only difference is instead of single braces you need to use double, for example where in the Smarty docs it gives you a line like this {include file="sidebar.php"}

when you implement that into MT it will need to become {{include file="sidebar.php"}}

This was chosen over the single braces because the single braces can cause problems when you start writing Javascript. None-the-less if you really wish to use single braces, find in your mtview.php template the following line (thanks...

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I find the Configure Active Plugins list on the MT front page very useful, however this list has been getting longer and longer and I install more and more plugins that register on there. Eventually this bugged me (big surprise eh?) and I decided to move that to its own page. Click the thumbnail to the side for a larger image.

First open up lib/MT/App/CMS.pm and find around line 40

'list_blogs' => &list_blogs,

and add right underneath it

'list_plugins' => &list_plugins,

Next around line 342 (at the end of sub list_blog) fine

$param{no_breadcrumbs} = 1; $app->build_page('list_blog.tmpl', \%param); }

and add after it

sub list_plugins { my $app = shift;...

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Newsgator Toolkit

Although not directly related to Movable Type, many bloggers I know have been asking for such a tool. The Newsgator Toolkit is an extension for Mozilla Firefox that will eventually provide you with a series of complex and powerful tools...

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Posted on 10/13/2005 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Updates to the Style Generator

At long last I've made some updates to the Style Generator to better fit with Six Apart's standard. This means that you can finally apply the tips discussed in this tutorial to stylesheets created using the style gen. Most of...

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UPDATE 09/06: Rebuild Site

One of my favourite features in MT 3.1 is the "Rebuild This Template" button that appears when you save a template. When you click that button it doesn't popup another window for you to confirm the rebuild, no, it just rebuilds then and there. Unfortunately the button at the bottom of the page doesn't do the same. Also because my template body field is huge, that bottom button is quite far down so I have to scroll for a bit. These two annoyances led me to hack the edit_template.tmpl file found MTDIR/tmpl/cms/, this hack is only available in MT 3.1 and greater. If you feel uncomfortable with hacking files but would like to have this hack, please contact me and I will quote you a price for the installation....

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Publishing Custom Pages with Movable Type

MT has had the ability to output any content in a template since version 1.0 in 2001, however it doesn't have the "push button" simplicity of Wordpress' Pages feature. For those of you unfamiliar with Wordpress, its Pages feature allows...

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Posted on 08/02/2005 | Permalink | Comments (2)

Ajax Archive Drop Downs

In this thread, Gary highlighted how to have drop downs of archives that basically redirected to the appropriate page once an archive was chosen. With this tutorial, I'll take that one step further and use...

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This hack is for versions of Movable Type prior to 3.2. This hack has been implemented into Movable Type 3.2

I'm a lazy person and hate having to click repetitively to do tasks and I get easily annoyed at having to keep hitting save and then rebuild whilst making changes to my site. So a hack later I have a Save & Rebuild button which will first save the template and then rebuild it with just one click!

Open lib/MT/App/CMS.pm and around line 1149 find

sub save_object{

and add underneath it

my $sr = 0;

Next on line 1340 find

$obj->text($text);

and add underneath it

if($q->param('sr')){ $sr = 1; $app->rebuild_indexes( BlogID => $obj->blog_id,...

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Many people wanted to know how I implemented these guicktags into my comments form. So here's a quick tutorial for that. In your comments form find

<p><label for="text">Comments:</label> <MTIfAllowCommentHTML> (you may use HTML tags for style)</MTIfAllowCommentHTML><br/> <textarea tabindex="4" id="text" name="text" rows="10" cols="50"></textarea></p>

and replace it with

<div class="quicktags"><p><label for="text">Comments:</label> <MTIfAllowCommentHTML><script src="http://www.movalog.com/mt/js_quicktags.js" type="text/javascript"></script><script type="text/javascript">edToolbar();<...

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The second plugin in the pluginset known as Ajaxify, this plugin adds a search suggestion feature to the Quicksearch box at the top when you search for entries, comments or trackback. There's very little to talk about this plugin but I should note that it is a little buggy when handling search terms with spaces for example "MT Blogroll". I've been trying to find a fix but the javascript is unreadble! None-the-less, it works quite well as can be seen from this screenshot. It has, of course, been built for Movable Type 3.2. Go grab your copy.

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MT has had the ability to output any content in a template since version 1.0 in 2001, however it doesn't have the "push button" simplicity of Wordpress' Pages feature. For those of you unfamiliar with Wordpress, its Pages feature allows you to create individual static pages (index pages in MT) with the simplicity of the entry screen, i.e. you don't need to worry about the styling or markup – just type out the content and voila, you're done.

This tutorial describes the process to simplify the process of creating standalone pages so that, in essence, you simply need to type out your content. This is useful for using Movable Type as a powerful general content management system.

There are 3 main...

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