Recently in Movable Type Category

It seems rather fitting that my first entry to this Web-Notes Blog should be about installing the software that runs it: Movable Type 4. In the past I have used Movable Type 3, and have been generally very pleased with it, though rather annoyed just how many spam comments I received, and how many track-backs to a variety of suspect websites. In the end, I just turned Comments and Track-Backs off. I kept getting reminders to upgrade my software, but was reticent to do something about it. 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it' was the main reason, and the worry that installing new software over the old blog setup would cause problems causing me to loose what I already had. The Upgrade Page explains the progress quite clearly, but the accompanying comments on the bottom of the page show that these things do not always go smoothly.

In the end, what prompted me to make the change was getting the whole site hacked. The hack took an evening to clean up. Actually, there were two hacks - one I hadn't even noticed before! I suspect that they got in through a loophole in the old blog software. Time to do something about this, and install something more secure. I chose to follow the safe route and do a completely new install of Movable Type 4, in a new folder. If this went wrong, I still had the existing setup to fall back on. It would also be easier to copy the entries from a working Blog.

Below are the Movable Type 4 Quick Start Instructions. I have added a few comments of my own...

If you are using a Linux or Unix Web server with all required components installed, follow these steps to install Movable Type:

Use a Web browser to connect to the Movable Type Download page and follow instructions there to download the Unix/Linux/Mac OS X (.tar.gz) release file to your personal computer.

I had a strange thing happen here: when I tried to download the file on my laptop, the 'Open File' dialog started, but the 'Save' button never appeared. When I tried on a computer at the office, all worked fine. I also tried to download the Windows .Zip file on my laptop, but it would only download a section of the file, never the full amount. Opening the file brought up a 'Corrupted Archive - Please Download This File Again' message. The .Zip file downloaded fine on the office computer. Just why I couldn't download properly on the laptop was something I never did work out. I wonder how many other people have encountered this?

Extract the Movable Type files from the release file into a new folder on your local computer. You will need a program that can uncompress and extracts tar files. If you don't have such a program, you can learn how to get one on the gzip home page, http://www.gzip.org.

Start your FTP program and connect to your Web server using your server login name and password.

Copy the mt-static directory from your local computer to the Web root directory on the Web server.

I'm a big fan of actual examples in instructions like this. Authors often forget that newbies don't have the same basic background information that they do.

If your website is called http://www.mysite.com, then you should upload the folder 'mt-static' to http://www.mysite.com/mt-static

Open the cgi-bin directory on your Web server. Make a new directory within it named mt. Copy all of the other Movable Type installation folders and files to the mt directory.

This means that you create a folder called 'mt' here: http://www.mysite.com/cgi-bin/mt and copy everything to it from the downloaded archive except the 'mt-static' folder.

A note about folder-names in Movable Type 4: It is easy to make an assumption that the 'mt-static' or the 'cgi-bin/mt' folders wil be the access point to your new Blog, and be tempted to change the names to something that suits you. This is not the case. During the installation of the Movable Type 4 software, you will be prompted to enter the name of your required base directory - a name you chose for yourself. For instance, say you would like your Blog to start from the address: 'http://www.mysite.com/myblog/' then you can just enter that value when specifying your new blog. Movable Type4 will suggest a folder name when you enter the Blog name, but it can easily be changed. One word of warning: say you wish your blog to be in a sub-directory, such as 'http://www.mysite.com/blogs/myblog/'. When you create the 'myblog' blog, you will find that Movable Type has placed the new folder in the root directory (i.e. 'http://www.mysite.com/myblog/'), not under the 'blogs' folder. You will need to move the 'myblog' folder to its proper location, and then point Movable Type to where it now is, by clicking 'Preferences >> Blog Settings >> Publishing', and altering the values in the 'Site URL' and Site Root' boxes, not forgetting to click the tiny padlock on the right that allows you to unlock the values.

Make sure all the Movable Type cgi files (files ending with .cgi) in the mt directory on the Web server have execute permission. You should be able to select these files and check their properties with your FTP program.

This means that you should set their permissions (also called CHMOD) to 755.

Start a Web browser and run the installation wizard by connecting to the following Web address: http://domainname/cgi-bin/mt/mt.cgi where "domainname" is the domain name for your blog.

Follow the instructions provided by the installation wizard, to complete the installation and set up your Movable Type user name, password, and blog name. If you encounter problems during the installation, see Troubleshooting Installation Problems.

I'm impressed! The installation went very smoothly, and I acheived a working Blog in just a few minutes. 10 out of 10 to Movable Type. On the downside, though, their documentation is nothing short of attrocious. To make the most minor of changes I had to spend hours searching around the internet for clues. The Movable Type documentation is split over several sites, and its not always clear which notes apply to MT3 and which to MT4. The Forum is of more help, but I quickly noticed that MANY questions are going un-answered. MT, with all its customers, doesn't seem willing to assign a company man to monitoring their feedback. I will certainly be posting a few how-tos here on this Blog from time to time: lets hope others do the same.