Movable Type Upgrade

Just downloaded the latest version of MovableType (3.11). They certainly have made it very difficult to download it. They have one of those wierd images with distorted set of characters which you have to read out and enter into the form to complete your download. It took me three attempts.

I probably shouldn't be complaining because I am using the free version anyway. Movable type is a very good software simple but versatile, just the way I like it. If I ever find myself with a bit of cash to spare I am going to buy the paid version, not because I need it (this is a personal site) but because I think they deserve the support.

Now to get on to the upgrade; I am moving from 2.661 to 3.11 they have a special download for upgraders and that is what I obtained and untarred. The blog itself has been tarred up and moved to a safe place ready for the upgrade, when we continue we will be using the new version.

The upgrade script mt-upgrade30.cgi choked:

Upgrading your databases:

An error occurred while upgrading the schema:

Tie to 'db/author.created_on.idx' failed: Permission denied at /home/raditha/websites/raditha/mt/lib/MT/ObjectDriver/DBM.pm line 610.

This was overcome by changing the permissions on the db folder to 777 something which was not needed with the previous version. I decided it might be better to change ownership to nobody and change the permissions back to 700 before running the mt-upgrade31.cgi script.

I am still faced with a minor hiccup, I have forgotten my password and this installation is on my desktop, a machine that does not have a mailserver (well I did have qmail but a recent hard disk error killed it. Does that mean my password is lost for ever? Not really, I just edited the recover_password method in CMS.pm to echo out the password instead of mailing it.

That's when I realised that I had messed up my permissions altogether because MT was claiming that the username was not found. Changing the perms again sorted things out.

The last few paragraphs above were added using the new version. The UI for the old version was heaps better than this.