Recently in MT Installation Category

Movable Type puts the BLING in BLoggING! ;-)

Movable Type 3.2 finally made its official debut today. Six undeclared favorite things notwithstanding ;-), MT's newest release was definitely worth the wait. The beta process was thorough (and thoroughly fun!) and the public aspect of the beta testing presumably yielded a wide variety of installation and publishing configurations, resulting in more bugs exposed and eliminated. In addition to a generous list of cool new features, MT's licensing is expanding to UNLIMITED weblogs for ALL licenses, including the personal free version. If that isn't enough, SixApart is discounting (through September) the Personal Basic and Personal Unlimited versions $30 less the regular price (that's 30% to 40% off!!). And, of course, updates are free for licensed users of MT3.x. I could go on about my own list of favorites for too long. Just to get started, there is the new categorized and fully searchable Movable Type 3.2 User Manual. Conveniently included in the manual are Known Issues and Errata, as well as a running list of five "Top Support Issues" in the sidebar. Although a little overwhelming at first glance, I quickly came to appreciate the smart new templating system. Along with that is the new Movable Type Style Library with downloadable and style sets for MT3.2. If you want to tweak the default style, head on over to Arvind's brilliant Movable Type Style Generator! (please consider a donation for his work while you're there) One of the things I'm really enjoying is the vastly improved user interface with so many user-friendly conveniences... a system overview that lets you manage blogs across the installation from one location, including mass entries and comments; expanded features in the blog management interface; improved organization of blog management; plugin management; etc. Much thanks and many congratulations to the SixApart team and the Movable Type community (another awesome feature! wink) for an excellent product. Like I said, I could go on and on... just go get MT3.2 and see for yourself. :)

My hosting service recompiled image::magick for me today - I have been unable to create mt thumbnails for several months and finally got around to putting in a help ticket. I'm SO happy to have it back! the boys at dixiesys and 8-95 rock!

problem: automagical thumbnail feature in MT suddenly quit working, yielding a "page not found" error as well as the following entry in error log whenever mt.cgi or mt-check.cgi looked for imagemagick:

I found several threads on MT's support forums where users had similar problems. Just about all reported success when their hosts did a forced reinstall of image::magick (whole package with perlmagick, not perlmagick separately). QUOTE FROM ONE THREAD: "Note to Red Hat admins who need ImageMagick-perl for users: Don't bother with the RPMs -- that way lies grief - they install themselves incorrectly. Install the whole ImageMagick tarball from source and PerlMagick gets installed correctly at the same time."

Passed all of the above on to my tech support guys and they fixed me up... huzzah!

Up and running with no issues. It's amazing, though, when hacking the source code how one teeny tiny sin of omission (in this case a backslash preceeding an apostrophe) can whack out the whole install. My bad. What can I say?

more to come

My first goal as a MovableType blogger is an expeditious and successful installation.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, indeed, and a Movable Type installation is no exception. Investing a little time toward understanding the basic requirements and steps (read: documentation is your friend!) will go a long way in getting MT up and running and getting YOU blogging! (and that's what this is all about, right?)

(more to come)