8 posts tagged “movabletype”

The other numbers keep getting smaller, but the number of cases requiring repro goes up, *sigh*.

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Now available at http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/

Both the classic and new enterprise versions.

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Today was a red-letter day at Six Apart, as the latest addition to the 6a product family, Vox (né Comet) announced itself to the world, in "preview" form. Not to be outdone by its brash young sibling, twelve hours later Movable Type 3.3 launched its public beta.

I'm proud to have contributed to the development of both products-first as an alpha-tester for Vox (when it was known as Comet) and then QA Engineer for Movable Type. After my years in exile, it's great to be back at a company doing big things. It was great to be in the office today feeling the tension, excitement and dare I say joy as Comet became Vox, and the blogs that had been walled off for three months burst out into the light.

Someone very wise (it might have been Roberrt Heinlein's alter ego Lazarus Long) defined happiness as working very hard at what you love. I think 6a exemplifies that attitude. Riding home on BART right now after tweleve plus hours at the office, I'm tired, but a good kind of tired-satisfied, knowing that whatever happens, at least I gave it my all, and so did everybody else on the team.

"When you do something, you should burn completely, like a good bonfire, and leave no ashes."
—  Shunryu Suzuki

We're getting closer to crazy delicious. After my post last night about using MovableType as a CMS for the Trizzle Project site, Ben Trott was nice enough to suggest that I try using dynamic publishing. He also supplied a link to the documentation that I probably should have looked at before going ahead... but I didn't, and as a result I completely broke publishing my blog. No matter what I did, I just got an Apache server error, even after following the instructions that Ben had pointed me too. I decided to back off on dynamic publishing until I understand MT better.

So I deleted my existing blog publishing directory, rebuilt my site with static pages, and that fixed the probems. Then I decided to try something else-having MT produce php pages in my site instead of html. My hope was that I could then put the trizzle php code into the

I copied my external main-index.html template file and renamed it main-index.php, then pointed to it in MT's template options for index.html. Rebuilt the site, and everything worked fine. After that, I put some test php code in my main-index.php file and lo and behold, it executed once I rebuilt the file. Now proceeding with more confidence (which required some not very robust editing of php require paths-one thing I am going to have to  figure out how to organize my site directories under this new regime) I put in some code from the old trizzle index.php site, and it worked!

If you look at the screenshot below, you will see a MovableType produced index page, but with a "Trizzle Tags" content module on the left that is producing the Trizzle tag cloud using php code.

Edit: updated the screenshot after more tweaking of the css, and adding some real content.

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Another startup referenced by TechCrunch, this time a blog-related one: BackUpMyBlog , which does exactly that-back up your blog, assuming your blog runs on mysql and is on a server you have the right to execute php scripts on. Thus, the only 6A product it will work with is MovableType. As the FAQ puts it:

Can you backup my LiveJournal, TypePad, MySpace or other hosted blog?
No. BackupMyBlog only works if you have rights to install scripts on your blog server.

I'm not sure this is really a business. I looked at the php script it generated and while it looks fine I can't claim it would be hard to reproduce. It seems more like something someone should just write and offer to people for free. Of course, BackUpMyBlog also has to maintain the repository where the backups get sent, but still.

It seems like it would be a good feature for MovableType, for 6A to maintain a backup server for MovableType users who were unwilling to set up backup for their MT installations. That seems like small market though-anyone smart enough to be able to set up and use Mtype is probably also smart enough to know they should be backing up their system.

crazy delicious? Well, hopefully soon. Today I started creating a new Trizzle Project website, using MovableType as a blogging/content management system for the site-a project which is win-win for me because it both improves the Trizzle site, and also helps me understand how MovableType works and what it's like for a developer using it to run a site.

Right now it's pretty slow going because I'm figuring out how how the CSS and tags work in the MT templates. One of the first things I did was have MT start using external template files instead of one stored in its (database? well, internally in any case) which works well, once you sort out the permissions problems. This is good because then I can examine and edit the template files in a text editor, instead of having to scroll around in a browser textarea, which is pure giznank.

The principal pain I'm experiencing now is having to rebuild my site every time I make a change. I'm one of those developers who, especially when I'm in just starting out, likes to make a few small changes and then see the results. With Mtype this means rebuilding the site, which takes a bit of time and involves several mouse clicks, and a visit to a small pop-up window which is easy to lose.

I wish MT had an option for a "developor" mode where changes made to template files would show up instantly in the site files, so you could just make an edit, then reload the web browser. Then once you actually wanted to put the site on the web, you could put it in "production" mode and build the site, which is more efficient for serving up files.

Obviously this would be a huge architectural change-because the site files couldn't be html while in developer mode, they'd have to be dynamic. It might be more development effort than it's worth.

Tonight I finished getting MovableType running on my Powerbook G4. When last I left it, I was lacking several crucial Perl modules. Thanks to this article, I learned that all I needed to do was install DBD::mysql using cpan. First time it giznanked since it was expecting the mysql root user not to have a password. I already have mysql installed on my system, of course, with a password since that's safer. Using navicat, I got rid of the password, ran cpan again, this time successfully, then restored the root user password. After that, MovableType was able to create all the tables it needed to in mysql.

After that, mt-check.cgi was happy and I was able to get mt.cgi. While poking around the movabletype directory, I discovered that there's a php version of it. Interesting. Then I had to figure how to login to mtype. Since I never read documentation unless I can absolutely help it, I was briefly flummoxed by the login screen with no clue how to create the default user. A quick google search informed me I was supposed to login as melody/nelson. Who's that, I wonder?

The only other problem I encountered was when I tried to give my blog publishing directory the same name as the directory where I installed MovableType, Quite understandably, when I tried to publish my blog, it gave me an error message; though not a terribly helpful one, about file permissions. It's always about file permissions in unix.

So now I have a MovableType blog. I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to do with it, since I already have a blog in Typepad, and in Comet. Maybe I'll build a metablog system that takes the same blog entry and posts it to all four of 6A's blogging products. For the Comet post it could auto-create tags and add album art and cat pictures, while the LiveJournal entry would have bunch of omfg!!!s, lol!!s and wtf?!?!s randomly inserted in it.

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.