Movable Type 3.1 Still a Developer Edition?
September 01, 2004 | 
43 Comments
Summary: My first impressions of Movable Type 3.1.
Last night I upgraded my MT 3.0 install to the new 3.1 version. It was a somewhat vague, unexpectedly problematic and ultimately uninspiring process.
After I got it up, which was a pretty painless process, I wanted to tear in and look into the new features as they sounded pretty exciting.
They are, in fact, much less impressive in reality, at least to my eyes. You pretty much need to have a decent degree of technical know how and some time to get your hands dirty to get most of the good stuff working, even in the most basic way. For me, I’ve got to be pretty damn motivated to get my mind around this stuff, and I really was expecting more “out-of-the-box functionality.”
I also realized a bit later that the new upgrade also broke the basic fuctionality of my site, something no previous upgrade had done and I’m a tad miffed about that.
But, before I get into that, let’s look at the reality of a few the new “features”, shall we?
Sophisticated Subcategories
Not nearly as sophisticated as I’d have thought. They probably work just as advertised, and I just misunderstood, but I expected much more from these. I want to be able to assign a category and have it “stay” attached to it’s parent category. This is how a “sub”-category works, in my opinion. In reality you’ve got to re-assign it to the main category as a “secondary” category once you make it part of the “sub” category.
Sound confusing? I thought so, so I’m not going to bother with them. I think maybe some better multi-post category (and keyword) management would be really cool to have in a future release. It could be they just don’t do what I want. Then again, this is far from a priority.
Post Scheduling
Oh, I was really excited about this one…
Until I saw that it was more complicated than just setting a “publish on” time. I don’t really get how this works, but it looks like it was really just allowing for set up of a chron job on the server. I read through the docs and it’s more work that it’s worth, at least for moi. Sure it’s cool if you know how to use the shell, etc. But for the less “server admin” inclined, like myself, this is a bit complicated.
Dynamic Publishing
Well, to be honest, I wasn’t that interested in this, but I looked into it anyway. If you are comfortable with .htaccess, willing to do some hacking and can live with your perl based plug-ins not working, this might be available to you. For me, I can’t use it (plug-ins) and even if I could, the set up takes much to much technical thinking to make it worth it.
See a theme growing here. I want software that works for me, not the other way around. The new features in MT 3.1 are more effort than their worth in my opinion. Good thing I don’t care too much about having any of them! ;)
Other features
From what I can make out, some of the “lesser” (in my mind anyway) features work as advertised. Their technical support is good and the developer network and plug-in architecture are nice. I love the comment moderation and the new version of MT-Blacklist is great (although it really sucks we even need a plug-in like that.)
The thing is, most of these things, as far as I can tell, were there in 3.0. I realize the 3.1 version was to “release it to a wider audience,” but I don’t think they were quite ready.
Not ready for the general public?
I don’t think so. Not if it breaks my site.
After thinking my install was all good, and just being slightly disappointed in the less-than-inspiring new features, I realized that my index pages weren’t rebuilding when they should, like, for example, when someone leaves a comment. Uh-oh, pretty big problem, eh?
So, the 3.1 upgrade broke basic functionality of my site. They made quite a big deal about how they got it out quickly and sure it’s great they got it out in 6 months or whatever, but now my site is broken. This is something none of the previous upgrades had done. Sometimes faster isn’t better.
To their credit Six Apart’s customer support has been very helpful and I expect my problem to be resolved soon, I’m just a bit miffed there was any major change in my basic functionality.
Next time let’s hope they wait a bit longer and get the bugs worked out. So, to sum up, my first impressions of MT 3.1 are less than great, although I’ll say I was really impressed with 3.0.
And, yeah, it’s not all bad (MT 3.0 is way better than 2.6x) but if you’ve already got 3.0 you might want to hold off on 3.1 until Six Apart can come up with a true “for the public” release.
Filed under: Web Development
Comments
1. Andrew said:
So, how’d you fix the problem with comments?
Posted on September 1, 2004 03:27 PM | #
2. Keith said:
Not fixed yet. It’s not the comments, it’s the index templates. They don’t rebuild when they are supposed to. I’ve got customer support looking into it. It could be I over-wrote something I wasn’t supposed to when I pushed the new files up, but I don’t know…it was, as I said, very vague in the upgrade instructions.
I don’t imagine it to be a huge problem, still, I was expecting no problems.
Posted on September 1, 2004 03:30 PM | #
3. Keith said:
It’s also slow to rebuild the individual archive upon submission of a comment. The page gets reloaded, just as a successful comment might, but it takes a minute for the new comment to show up. Kind of like that old problem I had before. I sure as heck hope I don’t have to deal with that again…I’m hoping, and assuming, they’re related.
Posted on September 1, 2004 03:32 PM | #
4. Josh Poulson said:
After I upgraded the software, I completely rebuilt each of my blogs, just in case. Then I went on to start tweaking my templates. My templates would rebuild fine after that.
I upgraded from 3.0D to 3.1. I have custom templates for index, style, and individual archives, but they are hardly unusual.
I will not say my blog is the most featureful or fancy, I don’t use any plug-ins that I know of, but it did work for me.
After the upgrade I finally turned on category archives, but I have not yet made a list of categories on my index. I haven’t really gone looking through the docs to generate that list of clickable archives, but I’m sure that sort of things exists.
–jrp
Posted on September 1, 2004 03:40 PM | #
5. Christian said:
But at least you got MT-Blacklist 2.01b protecting your comments, right? =) I too was excited about 3.1, especially with the dynamic publishing. Now we can’t even use it because it doesn’t support the majority of the plugins we already have installed and are using. I agree that users should “hold off on 3.1 until Six Apart can come up with a true ‘for the public’ release.
Posted on September 1, 2004 03:41 PM | #
6. Keith said:
Christian – Yeah, MT-Blacklist was protecting my comments, but that broke with the upgrade as well. Then again, I was using the “emergency release” and I imagine I just need to re-install it.
Posted on September 1, 2004 03:45 PM | #
7. Dave S. said:
“I want to be able to assign a category and have it �”stay�” attached to it’s parent category.”
This strikes me as the only logical way for sub-categories to work. Given the similarity between the current categorization and how you described sub-categories in 3.1, I’d guess the functionality was thrown on top of the existing method.
I’d think the usability of this would improve over time, now that it’s technically do-able.
Glad you took the plunge and went first, I’m not ready to move to the new version yet until I hear more about what to expect from the installation. Thanks Keith, you’re an excellent Guinea Pig!
Posted on September 1, 2004 03:50 PM | #
8. Garrett said:
I had problems with my comments not publishing themselves and submitted a bug during beta testing. The problem was fixed by adding:
LaunchBackgroundTasks 0
to the mt.cfg. However, if you have to turn background tasks off, you can’t use MT-blacklist.
I really would have much rather waited another month for a more solid release. By the way, I’m running on IIS 5.0 w/ MySQL, so my issues might be ver limited since most MT users aren’t running on Windows.
Posted on September 1, 2004 03:50 PM | #
9. Keith said:
Dave – Yeah, after some experimenting with the subcategory feature, it just didn’t seem to offer a whole lot. As far as me going first, I figured it was my turn. ;)
Garrett – Hmm, sounds similar. The thing is my site was functioning properly with rebuilds and MT-Blacklist and now neither are working right…I really hope it’s an easy fix. I’ll be sure and let everyone know.
Posted on September 1, 2004 03:56 PM | #
10. Scott said:
I have heard some good things about 3.1 and some bad, even though it was released a short time ago. Not to be rude but I have tried out both Wordpress and Movable Type, and I personally found Wordpress to be much easier for the average everyday joe. Me, I focus more on design, so I’m not that good with coding, although, I could make Movable Type on my own which alot of people can’t do.
All in all what I’m trying to say is I give credit where due to Movable Type but in my eyes it’s not as good as Wordpress. The new dynamic pages are the best thing they could’ve done though ;).
Posted on September 1, 2004 04:05 PM | #
11. Anil Dash said:
Keith, you say “I also realized a bit later that the new upgrade also broke the basic fuctionality of my site, something no previous upgrade had done and I’m a tad miffed about that.”
That’s a pretty serious problem, and we’ve certainly never released a version of MT that would cause an issue like that intentionally. Can you describe more about what happened, because it sounds (later in your post) as if you’re saying you think it might have been a problem in your upgrade, not in the app. Can you elaborate?
I want to be able to assign a category and have it “stay” attached to it’s parent category. This is how a “sub”-category works, in my opinion. In reality you’ve got to re-assign it to the main category as a “secondary” category once you make it part of the “sub” category.
I don’t know what you mean by this. If you have a category and click on “create” to make a subcategory, it’s a subcategory. There’s no reassigning or anything else necessary.
I am not sure what the behavior is that you’re describing, but again, if you can give us more information, maybe we can explain this better.
Posted on September 1, 2004 04:27 PM | #
12. Anil said:
Oops, lost my cite tags there. Sorry if my response looks confusing without them.
Posted on September 1, 2004 04:29 PM | #
13. MacDara said:
I had problems installing it myself last night, upgrading from 3.0D. I needed to, because 3.0D had slowed to a crawl for me over the last few days, timing out constantly on rebuilds and refusing to create backup files.
Hoping also that it would solve issues I had with my comments (it refused to accept unregistered comments without approval), I found it actually made things worse - like sending me e-mail updates on new comments, when that option was specifically unchecked in the config menu. I was about to go nuts when I took a gamble and removed MT-Blacklist to see if it would help - and surprise surprise, things went back to normal.
But anyway, it was much harder work than it should have been; I’ve never had such problems with any of the 2.x versions of MT I’ve used, but it took me the best part of an hour to upload the files without error messages flying at me - even running the upgrade script threw up an error for some reason. And now I’m sans-Blacklist. (Though it’s not like I’m plagued with comment spam so it’s not essential, and I’ll consider reinstalling when a more stable version comes out, though I guess that won’t be till Jay gets his hard drive problems sorted.)
Posted on September 1, 2004 04:34 PM | #
14. Rich said:
I hate to say it because I do like MT the company and its people, but because of everything you said above (and more), WordPress is the way to go. It’s so much cleaner than MT… much of it’s success in its design is because MT was around before it, so it had something to improve upon.
I used to be an MT user… from version 2 to 3.0D. I just got tired of the complexities of MT (it’s so bloated) so I decided to switch to WP. I’ll never look back.
Posted on September 1, 2004 04:57 PM | #
15. Keith said:
Anil – I’ve been noticing all sorts of minor issues. I do have a support person on your end helping me, and after looking in the support forums, I see I’m not the only one with these problems.
The main thing is this: Index pages are only rebuilt when I manually tell it to.
You can see what I mean by posting a comment. It doesn’t show as being posted on my main page, for example. When I post a new entry, it only builds the archive – not the indexes. I have to do that manually.
Make sense? It is possible I did something wrong in the upgrade, but I didn’t get any errors and followed the directions. Having said that, this line was pretty vague:
And I’m supposed to know what was installed the first? How, exactly? :) Might look into rewriting this one for us dummies out there. I just uploaded extlib like the rest…
As far as the subcategories, they probably work as intended and we’re just talking semantics. I’ll explain with a “real world” example:
If I’ve got a catergory “review” that I’ve got entries in where I review books, movies and concerts and I want to assign a book review a subcategoy of “books” (example: review > books) it replaces the category “review” with the new sub-category “books” rather than adding a new subcategory to the post.
I want the main category of the post to be “review” and the subcategory to be “books” with out having to go back an assign a secondary category. Make sense? It’s a bit hard to explain.
Anyway, as always, thanks a bunch Anil for taking the time to stop by and respond – it’s great that you do that!
I’m sure the new release will be great once it’s ironed out. One of the reasons why I post these is to help get those issues resolved. Yeah, it’s mostly selfish (squeeky wheel) but… ;)
Posted on September 1, 2004 05:14 PM | #
16. James Z said:
I have had very similar problems. I upgraded from 3.01D to 3.1 the AM. The upgrade did not break my install, but it has caused various problems with the plugins that I use.
My major complaints are with the sub-catagories not acting intuitively. And the really cool sounding dynamic pages really aren’t so cool. The ammount of work that I have had to put into just understanding how to make them work is astounding.
I began blogging last year with a home-grown php app and jumped ship to MT because it was most popular, robust and had the most useful plugins. However, I have grown weary of the “change > rebuild > examine > repeat ” that MT gets you into. And because of that I am seriously considering a switch to WP.
Posted on September 1, 2004 05:19 PM | #
17. David Raynes said:
Okay, I think I understand what you mean here. The subcategories feature in MT 3.1 allows you to define relationships between individual categories, specifically parent and child relationships. That is where it ends. It has absolutely nothing to do with entries. You can assign an entry to the “books” category, and that category happens to be a subcategory of “review.” There are template tags that will allow you to display that hierarchy with the entry, as well as include all of the entries from a category’s subcategories in its archive template.
For example, here is the template code I use on my site to display the hierarchies for the categories assigned to an entry:
<ul> <MTEntryCategories glue=”“> <li><MTParentCategories glue=” → “><a href=”<MTCategoryArchiveLink>” title=”<MTCategoryDescription>”> <MTCategoryLabel></a> </MTParentCategories></li> </MTEntryCategories> </ul>In the case of this entry, that code would output (minus the links):
I hope that I managed to make some sense there. :)
Posted on September 1, 2004 05:42 PM | #
18. Keith said:
David, thanks, yeah it does.
I guess my expectations were just a bit off. I’ll look into the solution you mentioned.
Posted on September 1, 2004 06:37 PM | #
19. Gabriel Mihalache said:
Don’t jinx it! Don’t upset the Perl gods because their revenge will can be awful! ;)
Posted on September 1, 2004 11:35 PM | #
20. Ben said:
Keith, I’ll second Dave’s comment - it’s nice to know others are testing the water before I jump in for a scalding Like you, my expectations for sub-categories were pretty different to what’s been delivered in 3.1. Unlike yourself, the “dynamic” publishing model is one of the key features I’d consider upgrading.
IMHO, the multitude of plug-ins is MT’s key functional differentiator over the less mature likes of Wordpress or Textpattern. I’m dissapointed and baffled at why Six Apart have chosen to include such an important feature without finding a way to ensure they (and hence many functions in my existing site) still work.
Much to my chagrin, I think I’ll be taking your advice and shelving that 3.1 .tar file for another day.
Posted on September 2, 2004 12:37 AM | #
21. Jack Mottram said:
This all sounds rather familiar. My site took a bit of a beating, as well, and I still haven’t been able to fix the rebuilding problems (which are the same as yours, only I get a worrying Internal Server Error when it gets to building Category pages too).
I think we’ve all been spoiled by Movable Type in the past - as you say, past upgrades tended to provide working new features after a painless installation. This one has nearly-working features with a lot of geeky business required to get them working. I’m fairly comfortable mucking about with things like .htaccess files, but setting up dynamic pages - the feature I was waiting for - is very tricky, especially if you keep archives in a different directory to your indexes (fairly common, I would’ve thought) or your host has restrictions on where you can include files from with PHP. I dread to think what someone who’d never heard of .htaccess would make of the process. If anything, 3.1 is more of a developers edition than the developers edition!
The thing is, I really don’t want to switch to WordPress. MovableType has given me years of happy, easy weblogging, so it feels remiss to jump ship at the first sign of trouble - I just wonder how long loyalty can outweigh the increasing inconvenience of using MT to power my site when I could get a WordPress version running in less time than it took to repair all the breakages caused by this upgrade.
Posted on September 2, 2004 04:47 AM | #
22. Shade said:
Keith,
I write a piece of blogging software called MagnaBlog… I’m curious, what are the major features that you feel makes MT above something like, say, Wordpress?
-Shade
Posted on September 2, 2004 05:54 AM | #
23. Bryan Buchs said:
I jumped right into the updgrade. Until I read your post, I didn’t know that PlugIns weren’t compatible with Dynamic Publishing - I didn’t find note that in the install docs. Of course, I found out the hard way. That was my primary reason for wanting to move to 3.1.
Oh well.
Posted on September 2, 2004 06:22 AM | #
24. Adrian said:
Man I really feel for you… I switched from MT to b2/WordPress several months ago and I’ve never been happier.
WordPress’s subcategories are super simple. When you go to create a new category, there’s a drop down that allows you to select which parent category it belongs to. If you don’t select anything, then it assumes that category is supposed to be a parent category. If you select a parent category, then it is made into a sub-category of the parent category. It’s that simple. It all shows up like its supposed to when you go to make a post, and it all shows up like its supposed to when viewing the site. You can make it as deep as you want to go too.
Post scheduling is also super simple on WP. Because all the pages are dynamic all the time, when writing a post, theres a field with a timestamp in it. That’s the time of the document’s publish time. Next to that field is a checkbox called “Edit TimeStamp?” If you check that box and change the time to whatever you want (say a week into the future), that post won’t show up anywhere until that time. Very nice.
Dynamic pages. Everything in WP is dynamically generated. They have a very nice template system. You have one index.php page along with any css files you want it to reference, and except for the rss feeds, everything is served up by that one page. What it shows depends on what you pass to it.
You’d probably be very happy with WP given the troubles you’re having with MT, though it would probably take a while to get your site working the way you want it to with their template system.
Posted on September 2, 2004 08:07 AM | #
25. Beerzie Yoink said:
Well, now. I’m glad I caught this post before upgrading. After upgrading to 3.0D, I have had comment problems (and an avalanche of spam) that finally caused me to close commenting. Frankly, I couldn’t be bothered to fix it.
I’m sorry to hear the features are not as intuitive and easy to work with as we have hoped. I’m not terribly technical, so having to hack files to enable functionality is a real pain in the neck. It’s not the way I want to spend my time. I don’t know why they didn’t take there time and get it right. I have been in the software business long enough to know that “faster isn’t better” is true of a truism as there is.
Posted on September 2, 2004 08:23 AM | #
26. BradFitz said:
Great information here, thanks a lot Keith. Makes me very happy of the decision I made of going with WordPress out of the gate. I do have a couple of *very* minor issues with WP, but nothing I can’t live with. I have a pretty straightforward blog, combined with my limited technical know-how, WP really makes it easy for me to do what I do best… draw. :)
Good Luck with ironing things out.
Posted on September 2, 2004 02:20 PM | #
27. Gambit said:
Hi all, I’m still using MT 2.66 and was wondering what you all mean by dynamic pages. What would the advantages of dynamic pages be over the way MT has been working before?
Posted on September 2, 2004 02:49 PM | #
28. David Clain said:
Dynamic pages are generated “on the fly” (when a page is requested); static pages are generated after a certain event and aren’t recreated with each request.
The major advantage is that you wouldn’t have the kinds of problems Keith is having – it doesn’t take a while for pages to be regenerated after comments are made.
Basically, dynamic pages spread the load across every request; static pages concentrate that load at commenting time.
Posted on September 2, 2004 04:42 PM | #
29. Tim Buchheim said:
I helped test the release candidates of 3.1, and I was really surprised that they pushed 3.1 out the door as fast as they did. It is still a bit rough around the edges, and I would certainly suggest that those running 3.0D hold off a bit before upgrading.
I do like the fact that subcategories now exist, although they could clearly make some improvements in that area. The dynamic pages don’t interest me much, especially in their current PHP incarnation. I’m thinking about playing with FastCGI to see if I can come up with something better. (mod_perl would be another approach, but it has enough security issues that many hosting companies would be wary of installing it.)
Posted on September 2, 2004 08:01 PM | #
30. orangeguru said:
I did the MT3.1 dance as well - and it crashed badly on me. SixApart makes nice shiny interfaces, but their overall sense for business and programming seems to be gone. So will I … WordPress calling …
Posted on September 3, 2004 10:20 AM | #
31. David Raynes said:
As the author of the subcategories code, I am curious as to what you think might be improved. The code in the MT core now is mainly just a port of the plugin version I wrote some time ago, without any significantly new functionality added, so I would like to know what other people might think could make it more useful.
(I would have left a comment for you on your site, but I don’t seem to be able to at the moment)
Posted on September 3, 2004 11:48 AM | #
32. jcwinnie said:
I strongly would advise anyone who is considering an upgrade from a working version (e.g., 2.661) to wait. MT just released 3.11, right after the 3.1 release, and still I have problems, e.g. the site fails to rebuild.
I am sorry to see such wonkiness from what was the premier, standalone, weblog engine.
Posted on September 4, 2004 07:11 AM | #
33. eric said:
Reading about your latest upgrade woes makes me glad I took the plunge and switched to Wordpress a while back. Then again, similar problems probably crop up with any blog cms update.
Still, after testing 3.0 and watching the process unfold, MT has certainly lost a lot of potential ‘customers’.
Posted on September 4, 2004 03:33 PM | #
34. Eduardo Arcos said:
I am having this very strange problem: When I create a new entry it posts without the assigned category.
I have to go again to MT, edit the entry, save it, and republish it, so the category “sticks”. Very weird and very, very bothering.
Posted on September 5, 2004 09:26 AM | #
35. Jason said:
I just wanted to add a positive voice to this (mainly because I think that posts like this attract more of the same, and become self-fulfilling) – I upgraded to MT 3.1, and other than an mt-upgrade30 problem, I’ve had no issues whatsoever. And I have to say that my site is far from a stock installation; I’ve spent years customizing the code and tweaking things here and there, and I’m nothing but pleased with the upgrade.
Understand that I’m not saying that others don’t have problems, just that I’m a pleased used, and exist as evidence that it’s not all bad!
Posted on September 5, 2004 08:40 PM | #
36. Ken Edwards said:
I have the same issue with my index pages not rebuilding when they should. I get this error:
Can’t call method “id” on an undefined value at lib/MT.pm line 770.
Is that what you get? I will put in a support ticket as well.
Posted on September 7, 2004 07:01 PM | #
37. Keith said:
Thanks to everyone who commented. The 3.11 release solved my problem.
Posted on September 7, 2004 08:57 PM | #
38. Sian said:
I was very disappointed about being expected to mess about with cronjobs which is outside my expertise with my domain. I’ve understood from the start that MT 3 is geared towards developers but what about the middle guy? someone in between Typepad and MT 3? and I was expecting a different way of configuring the plugins, I had visions of a plugin manager which included a little uploading and click of a button and hey presto all installed.
Posted on September 11, 2004 05:28 AM | #
39. padawan said:
Ken > same error here. I strongly suspect that my FTP transfer went badly and some files were corrupted. Make sure that all the ASCII files are transferred in ASCII mode, that the rights are correct on the server for executable files and that there were no interruption in your FTP upload.
Posted on September 13, 2004 03:12 AM | #
40. Gambit said:
Thanks David for the insite, kinda makes sense now why dynamic pages would be better then static.
Posted on September 13, 2004 03:36 AM | #
41. Sandman said:
I want to thank all of the WP users who have commented on this post (including Keith). I was unsure of whether I wanted to stay with WP or go back to MT, but it looks like MT has continued down a path that caused me to jump ship in the first place.
Now if I can just tackle the frickin’ CSS…
Posted on September 23, 2004 06:41 AM | #
42. Darren said:
Thanks David and for the insite, kinda makes sense now why dynamic pages would be better then static.
Thanks to everyone who commented. The 3.11 release solved my problem.
http://www.mozerstudios.com
Posted on January 8, 2005 07:17 PM | #
43. Dan Knauss said:
I waited to upgrade from 2.661 until 3.16 came out, and the upgrade process was easy, with only a few problems. However, after using it for a while, I haven’t seen any real benefit to the upgrade. What I thought would be the main benefit–dynamic publishing–is unusable without doing some major work and giving up certain functions. DP is simply a horribly documented kludge overlay that won’t play well with customized installations, Jay Allen’s long and tedious attempt to minimize this fact notwithstanding.
I have a large multi-blog system with a lot of plugins and interaction between blogs via php includes. Some of my templates inexplicably reverted to older versions, and some entries in each blog got duplicated since their titles were trimmed to a new, different length as filenames–beats me how that happened. Oh, and MT-Blacklist broke, but I needed the new one anyway.
I’ve used TextPattern and WP as well, and aside from the higher learning curve and slow-to-progress documentation of the latter, they both beat MT is many areas.
Posted on July 2, 2005 10:04 PM | #
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