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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Introduction

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...

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This new version introduces inline editing for comments by the commenters. A cookie is set when the person hits the post button on the comment form. The cookie is set to expire in 5 minutes so the person must make any edits within five minutes.

Download MT-InlineEditor_1.1.zip. Preserve the directories in the zip starting from your root MT directory (therefore files in the extlib/ folder in the zip go into MT's extlib/ directory and mt-ie-cookiecheck.php goes into your root mt directory etc.)

For every blog you want this enabled on, you will need to create two index templates of the two text files in the zip (mt-inlineeditor.php and mt-inlineeditor.js) I've used MT Tags in those...

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•

01: Installation and Upgrade

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

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3.2 (2005.08.25)

Major Features

• New dead-simple AJAX-powered installation/upgrade process (see screencast demo) which replaces mt-load.cgi and all mt-upgrade* scripts. Also eliminated the upgrade distribution since only the config file would be different. • Combined mt.cfg and mt-db-pass.cgi into mt-config.cgi. Shipping as mt-config.cgi-original so as to prevent overwriting when upgrading. • Introduced the new System Overview section which allows administrators to configure and manage aspects of the system across all weblogs • Introduced a plugin-based feedback rating framework which scores comments and TrackBacks upon submission on a scale from -10 (least desirable) to 10 (most desirable)...

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Co-authored by Elise Bauer and Arvind Satyanarayan. Tutorial cross posted on Movalog and Learning Movable Type

The installation instructions in the Movable Type Install Guide contain a section in the Configuration area called Enable Security Features. These instructions tell you to uncomment the Umask lines in your mt.cfg if your server is running cgiwrap or suexec. If you don't know what CGIwrap or suEXEC are, you may be tempted to skip this step. Don't. This step gives your MT installation extra security, which we will explain. (Note that this tutorial is only appropriate for MT installations on Linux/Apache web servers.)

What is CGIWrap or suEXEC?

CGIWrap and suEXEC are features...

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Another update to MT-Notifier, which fixes a small bug with purging a user record from within the management screen. This worked okay if you were purging your own record, but if you were accessing the user interface from your Movable Type main menu (logged into the system), when you purged user data, you were kicked out of management mode and had to start over (the data was purged, however). This has been fixed. I also added a small log entry to record the number of notifications sent during any particular notification run. Thanks to Simon for another excellent (and easy to implement!) suggestion.

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Introduction

While entries make up the content of a weblog and templates control how these entries are displayed, it is the process of publishing that makes a weblog go. Movable Type refers to the process of publishing as rebuilding -- a reference to its static page generation roots. When a rebuild is performed, templates and your content are merged to publish a page that visitors can view in their browsers.

Choosing Between a Static or Dynamic Publishing Model

Movable Type provides the flexibility to choose between either static page generation or dynamic pages to optimize...

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Warning: main(/home/elise/public_html/mt/mt32badge.inc): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/eliseb/public_html/archives/001012multiple_authors.php on line 90 Warning: main(): Failed opening '/home/elise/public_html/mt/mt32badge.inc' for inclusion (include_path='') in /home/eliseb/public_html/archives/001012multiple_authors.php on line 90

With MT you can have multiple authors on the same weblog, making it easy to have a friend contribute to your blog as a "guest author" or to create a group weblog to which many people contribute. You can even customize to a small degree, aspects of the author-specific Individual Entry pages.

Adding an Author

To add an author in MT 3.2...

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Updated 12:30 am PST, Oct 4

Wednesday morning, September 29th, Learning Movable Type and some of the other MT weblogs hosted at elise.com were intruded by a spammer who placed popup generating code on the MT index and archive templates. Not being aware of the additional code on my templates, as I rebuilt the pages of my weblogs, the rebuilt pages included this code which generated an obnoxious spam popup window every time someone visited the page. I apologize to all who may have been inconvenienced by this, and thank those of you who brought it to my attention.

The good news is that the spammer could have done a lot of damage to the site, but didn't. The bad news is I'm not sure...

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• Newsgator Toolkit • Updates to the Style Generator • Hurricane Katrina Donation • Movable Type Style Generator • Plugins Forums • Feeds Burned • The IndiBlog Awards • Planet Movable Type • MovaDir, v2 • Preview Release • Vulnerability in Servers Using PHP • Securing your weblog - CGIWrap and SuEXEC • Syndicate This Site • Upgrading • Consulting • Movalog Sideblog • Ask Arvind •

Code Snippets

• Random Banners • Quicktags for Comments • Reset Templates • Iconize • SubCats and Contents • Tweaking Searches • Password Protection • Alphabetizing archives • Relative Dates • Automatic Acronyms •

Dynamic

• Dynamic Publishing - Pros and Cons • Troubleshooting Smarty Errors • PHP Dirification • The DB and Dynamic Publishing • Custom Error Messages • Dynamic Pages & The .htaccess • Breaking Plugins • Smarty. MT. Dynamic...

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Question

Can I use PHP code in my templates?

Answer

Movable Type templates generate standard HTML pages; so any coding language which can be used in a standard web page can also be included in your templates.

Here are some important tips to remember about using PHP in your templates:

No shortcut tags in dynamic templates

If you are using PHP in a dynamic template, you should not use the "shortcut" opening tag: <?

Instead, you should use the full version: <?php

Template Tags are processed differently in static templates than...

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Updated. Originally posted April 3, 2005.

If you are using a MySQL database and your blog is PHP enabled (see Converting to PHP), you can use PHP scripts to pull blog data from your database to add customizations to your blog. For example, say you would like to have on your sidebar a quote, randomly pulled from a selection of quotes, with a new quote displayed every time you refresh the page. You can accomplish this by creating a separate weblog for quotes, then using a simple PHP script to pull the data from your MySQL database, and using a PHP include to put the script results into your main weblog page.

PHP scripts are a level of difficulty up from Movable Type, and require...

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Developing with the Movable Type Perl API

Problems

You want to extend Movable Type and develop an extension to the base system.

Solutions

Six Apart provides numerous resources to get you started with developing including tutorials and MT source code documentation.

Discussion

Movable Type's open code base and APIs (Application Programmers Interface) make the browser-based tool quite flexible and easily modifiable, allowing it to adapt to any number of publishing applications. Here are some pointers to that will get you started.

Perl API

The Movable Type code is written in an...

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Question

Can I pay Six Apart to install Movable Type for me, or upgrade my existing installation to the latest version?

Answer

Yes, we offer these services to those who have purchased a supported version of Movable Type.

Requirements Before We Begin

Please make sure to confirm that your host/server meets the requirements before requesting an installation, as the fee is non-refundable once we begin.

You can view the system requirements and get helpful information on choosing a web host in the Introduction to Installation and Upgrade in the Users Manual....

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With broad platform integration of all the leading open standards, Movable Type has the potential to do much more, given additional expertise and knowledge on the user's part.

This chapters covers some of the more advanced features in addition to providing a starting point for more advanced topics not covered in this publication.

Architectural Overview

Movable Type is written in a highly modular Perl object-oriented style with an open code base (it's not open source -- an important distinction) that makes the browser-based tool quite flexible and easily modifiable, allowing it to adapt to any number of...

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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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We have just released Movable Type v3.14 which fixes the issue of extreme loads witnessed on servers under the strain of a massive spam attack. Because these attacks are increasing in both frequency and severity, we strongly recommend that all Movable Type users install this update. This is particularly important for any installation that is visible to the public on the web.

This release is a free update for Movable Type v3.x users and has been thoroughly tested both in-house, by our ProNet members and also by many of the web hosting companies initially affected by the problem. If you already purchased Movable Type or downloaded the free version, you’ll be able to download...

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This plugin is for blocking feedback[ct(=comment) and tb(=trackback)] spams by adding an additional CCode(hidden ct input field) or adding TCode to original tb ID in tb URL, and then obfuscating that Code for the purpose of not easily guessing it.

MT 3.2's enforced anti-spam system is performed mainly after getting feedbacks. So if many spams are arrived, then it also uses system/MT user resourses when filtering, junking, unpublishing, and deleting spams although it becomes comparatively easy than pre 3.2.

CCode and TCode works in before saving spam feedbacks to MT system. CCode/TCode make it very difficult for spam-bots to guess tb URL and required ct input...

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Question

A list of all known issues in the latest version of Movable Type. Please be sure to review this list before using the product or opening a support ticket.

Answer

As of Version 3.16, released April 18, 2005 • Configuration • A new application method ("app_path") prevents the login cookie from being set when Movable Type is installed in the root folder, rather than a subfolder. See Keep getting login screen for the solution. • Archives • It is impossible to produce files with no file extension by using the File extension for archive...

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