Question

I found a plugin that I want to use on my site. How do I install it?

Answer

These are the basic instructions for installing a plugin, but you should always review the readme file for the plugin if one is included. Some authors will require files be placed in a different directory structure, so follow their instructions on this. • Download and unzip/decompress the plugin file from the author's site.

• Use your FTP client to log into the directory where MT is installed on your server. If a plugins directory isn't there yet, create one.

If you use...

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Question

Do you offer any installation instructions which are specific to Windows environments?

Answer

See Installing Movable Type on Windows in the 3.2 User Manual.

For more detailed information on configuring your Windows server to support a Movable Type installation, please see Installing Movable Type on Windows on the Six Apart website.

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Required: MT26x, MT3x, MySQL

What this does is let you put content from a syndicated feed in your MT Template. You need the feed plugin, and then you'll have to have some way of rebuilding the template occassionally so the content updates. The MT-Rebuild.pl plugin is perfect for this. I have mine set up to update every half hour.

First, you'll need the plugin. http://www.timaoutloud.org/code/mt/index.html#mt-rssfeed. The zip file will include the feed plugin and also the rebuild plugin.

Follow the directions in the package. All you really need to do (if you've got all the correct modules installed on your hosts server) is the following:

1. Go to your MT directory and make a dir...

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Installing Additional Language Support

Problem

You want support for an additional language.

Solution

Install one of Movable Type's language packs.

Discussion

Need input on how a user can request & acquire additional language packs.

Movable Type supports multiple languages through the use of language packs. A language pack is simply a list of translated phrases and words for use by the Movable Type system.

To install a language pack that you've downloaded from the Movable Type web site, follow these steps: • 1. Copy the translated phrases.

The .pm file contains the...

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Question

How do I install the StyleCatcher Plugin?

Answer

• Download the StyleCatcher plugin1 and unzip the file to your local computer. The files should be organized into two folders within a StyleCatcher folder. For example, after unzipping the file for version 1.0 of the plugin, you would have the following two folders, each with other folders and files inside them:

• StyleCatcher-1.0/mt-static/ • StyleCatcher-1.0/plugins/

• Open your FTP program and log into your server.

• Navigate to your mt-static directory2, and upload3 the contents of the StyleCatcher-1.0/mt-static/...

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Installing Movable Type via the Command-Line

Problem

You want to install the Movable Type software and have command-line (shell) access to the server.

Solution

Transfer the latest Movable Type distribution file to your server and unpack it into your CGI directory.

Discussion

• Unpack the software.

Download the latest Movable Type distribution file and transfer it to your server. Unpack the software into your web server CGI directory. For example, if you had downloaded Movable Type 3.2 US english distribution with the CGI directory as your present working directory, you could...

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Question

I see one or more very large files in my Movable Type installation folder which include core in the file name.

Answer

These are probably "core dump" files, which are created when a Perl script crashes. These files contain information about what the program was doing when it crashed and can be useful for debugging in some circumstances; but should just be deleted in most cases.

Core dumps don't happen very often, so if you've been experiencing unusual troubles with Movable Type recently, that could explain the presence of these...

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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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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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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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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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When starting the Movable Type Weblog, I disabled the search function. There just weren't that many entries and a search dialog was not necessary.

Today, searching the Movable Type Weblog would be a good improvement. So I tried with the default Movable Type Search Engine. However, each search resulted in a CPU-intensive action. I tried to read the Perl code and saw that each search was done by selecting all entries from the database, then looping over all entries and finding the matching entries with string operations.

This is not the best way to do a fulltext search. Especially with large weblogs, this will probably lead to bad performance. The architecture does not scale very...

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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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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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If you are experiencing intermittent "500 Server Errors" while using Movable Type and are using MySQL for your database, we are aware of the cause of the problem: a nightly cPanel update of a buggy version of the DBI and DBD::MySQL drivers. See this post on the Professional Network Weblog for more details.

The MT engineering team has been actively working with developer to help him rectify the problem. We apologize for any inconvenience and will keep you up to date on our progress as well as post here when the problem is solved.

UPDATE (Jul 6th, 2005 11pm PST): The developer of the DBD::MySQL driver reports that he has discovered the source of the problem (with the help of our own Brad Choate) and...

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What do all these folders do?

This tutorial is written by LMT guest author Arvind Satyanarayan of Movalog.

There are several folders in the default distribution of Movable Type. This tutorial will attempt to guide you through them all so that you feel more comfortable with what they do and contain.

extlib/

This directory contains perl libraries and files that support Movable Type. These are the modules that are needed by Movable Type to run (for example those modules listed in mt-check.cgi are normally found here) Some plugins also require some special perl modules to be installed, and normally you can install these perl modules into the extlib/ directory. For example, the BlogTimes plugin requires the GD perl module to be installed. Obviously you can get your host to install it and then that module would be available server wide. However, if you uploaded the files provided on the BlogTimes page into your extlib/ directory, you would have the GD module installed just for your installation without having to go to your host....

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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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• Once an entry or category has been set to receive TrackBack pings, disabling pings for it through the UI will not actually refuse pings to that item but will suppress display of those pings. • Rebuilds will fail silently after saving an entry if a problem exists in your templates (for example, mismatched tags or a missing include module). An error will be shown, however, upon manual rebuild using the "Rebuild Site" functionality. • The nofollow plugin will cause a spurious warning for users with older versions of Perl upon running mt-check.cgi, mt-testbg.cgi or any of the...

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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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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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