blogging: August 2007 Archives

So I upgraded to Movable Type 4 - somewhat painfully. A brief account of what I went through . . . My original theme/style/layout - whatever you like to call it - was working fine, but I wanted to be able to take advantage of the new tags that came with MT4. So I went to MT's documentation to see if I could find the default templates. If you are looking for them, you can find them here. However, funny things happened. One of the most annoying things is MT4's use of this

<__trans

tag. MT4 makes use of modules. For example, your index page may "include" several modules like the header and footer. For some reason, MT does it like this:

<$MTInclude module="<__trans phrase="Header">"$>

The most hilarious ( in a twisted, cruel kind of way ) thing is that even when you have a module ( let's call it "Header" ) and that module exists but is included like in my example above, MT doesn't seen to recognize the fact that it exists. It tells you this in two ways. One way is through the designer. It lists the modules that any particular, other module links to. Another way is when you attempt to re-build your site. It throws an error that tells you that the module cannot be found. You can alleviate this if you go through and take out the

<__trans phrase="

part of the MTInclude tag leaving this:

<$MTInclude module="Header">"$>

It also makes use of trans for the text output on buttons or headings. I have no idea what "__trans" actually does yet. I searched the documentation and I can't find any reference to it. It seems as if ( by virtue of the name ) that some kind of translation may occur. Perhaps for other languages? If you know - I'd really like to find out since it is used extensively throughout the templates. And for some odd reason, it wasn't working at all. Every time the "trans" tag was being used, the code was being output on the site. This made for some pretty ugly stuff.

Frustration set in and I decided to refresh the templates. Basically that means rolling all the templates back to their original or back-up state. And voila . . .everything mysteriously fell into place. Of course, re-styling to get the look and feel I want will be another matter entirely. I think my best bet is to install a version at home so I can mess with it at my leisure without screwing up things on this site. Additionally, I'd really like to be able to explore this new platform and exploit the new features as much as possible.

For anyone who happens to be interested, I'm planning on trying to include my findings, trials and tribulations as much as possible in the future not only as implemented here, but also as content for this blog. I haven't installed any additional plug-ins yet, but I plan to after I've modified the theme. I'm going to stick with the default template for now - at least until I've had a chance to muck around with this at home. So if you choose to slam me because I don't have an About page or a Contact page - feel free. Better yet, if you're really that curious you can read about me here.

The new template system in MT 4 is giving me some troubles. Not sure exactly what the problem is, but I'll track it down pretty soon. Besides some styling issues, things appear to be functionally ok. UPDATE I think things are fairly stabilized now. It still kind of looks like crap. The sidebar isn't doing what it's supposed to and that means I'm incredibly dissatisfied with the way the style thing works. So it looks like a re-design is in order. I was planning on this anyway. Either way - it's something to do and I've been looking at some stuff to use as far as re-styling this blog. Perhaps by later tonight I'll be able to unleash it.

It didn't take long for my web host to get MT upgraded to MT 4. They are great at responding to requests for support. However, because the current templates are styled ( theme in wordpress lingo ) for version 3.35 I'm going to have to refresh my templates to the default style in order for things to accurately reflect the changes in MT 4. I'm ok with this. I get bored with my style after a while anyway. I guess it's time for a change. Furthermore, one of the plug-ins I was using for "Related Entries" is not compatible with MT 4. When I tried to rebuild my site, I received an error about that plug-in. So for the time being I won't be able to include related entries until I either find another plug-in or develop my own. Hopefully things won't blow up when I refresh my templates. More to come later if everything works out.

I've used Movable Type for quite some time for this blog, as well as other common blog software packages. While each one of those software packages has their own ups and downs, I've come to appreciate MovableType. My host regularly upgrades the MovableType installation and I have asked that they upgrade my install to MovableType 4. I'm currently on 3.33. I just fired off the request a few minutes ago so we'll see how everything works out. I have high expectations as it boasts a large number of new features. If everything works out ok, perhaps I'll be able to find a way to work some of those new features into the the content of this blog. We'll see what happens. If you're curious about MovableType, by all means, check it out. Better yet, if you have questions I'd be more than happy to answer them either by email ( fortywhat AT gmail DOT com ) or by simply commenting here on my blog.