Installing MovableType on Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger"

In attempt to become conversant with all of 6A's products, I decided to try getting MovableType running on my Powebook. Getting MovableType running meant getting perl running. This required me to dust off the perl knowledge in brain that has been mouldering since the end of dotcom, August 1st 2001.

After some mucking around with the httpd.conf file, I hit a roadblock. No matter what I did, I coudln't get a cgi to run-I just kept getting file permission errors. After studying httpd.conf again, I realized that the instructions I had been following were having me execute perl cgis in Users/*/Sites, while Apache on my system is set up (with php) to serve files in Library/WebServer/Documents. I don't know which is better-seems like six of one half dozoen of another, but I didn't feel like possibly breaking what I already had working (my php set-up, which is key for project Trizzle) so I decided to edit httpd.conf to make perl happen in WebServer/Coments. So that's what I did, and it worked like a charm.

MovableType, though, is still not working. It seems that there a bunch of perl modules that either need to be installed or updated in order for it to work. So that's the next step. In general this is a problem with Mac OS X-even though it includes php and perl and other open-source technologies, which is sweet, they tend to lag behind what's current. It would be nice if Apple could keep more current with them, but it's probably not even in their top thousand things they worry about in Cupertino.