David Chiu

Over the past couple days I’ve been upgrading my various blogs to Movable Type 4. So far it’s been a pretty bumpy road - especially since I’ve also been migrating from a shared hosting plan over at Dreamhost to a super-fast VPS at Zone.net.

One of the biggest problems I had was with the new commenting system. Everything else seemed to be working fine, but every time I submitted a test comment the server would take a while to respond then give me a 500 error. Several google searches later and still nothing. I had a hunch that my problem had to do with the new captcha implementation in MT4 and the use of ImageMagick, but no documentation suggested that ImageMagick was a required component. Besides, I didn’t have captcha verification turned on. Another hour passed and I decided to go ahead and install ImageMagick…

BINGO! Now comments worked. So the lesson learned is:

ImageMagick is REQUIRED in a MT4 installation even if you don’t use captcha verification.

One of the biggest thing you’ll notice is that MT4 has a completely new look and feel. Personally, I don’t like it. It doesn’t seem to make it any easier to administer the system. In fact, it seems a little harder to navigate around MT4 since all the options are now buried within the new drop down menus. Another notable feature is the implementation of Javascript WYSIWYG text areas which make it easier to format text without having to type out HTML tags. There is also an option to switch between different text formats depending on your needs (coding, word formatting, etc). The MT Template tags have also been expanded to include the ability to set variables and create If/Then/Else logic structures. All of this is pretty helpful but I’ve found it better to create new index templates which output PHP modules which are then called by all the PHP archive pages (and main indexes) to include the content. For example, my Recent Entries sidebar module is actually setup as an index template which outputs a recent_entries_module.php file which is then included into my other pages using PHP:

<?php include (’recent_entries_modules.php’) ?>

The benefit of using this method is that this content is only generated once and written to the file system which saves on MT4 processing time when rebuilding pages. I’ve also found this method beneficial for more static content such as AdSense code, Flickr photo code or YouTube code because I can easily update those modules and have the change reflected across my entire site without having to rebuild the entire site.

There are still many more features in MT4 that I have not yet begun to explore, but so far I’m not all that impressed. BUT I still think Moveable Type is one of the best blogging/publishing platforms available - and I’ve tried the majority of them.