Four days ago I upgraded the motor of this site to Movable Type version 3.0D — the D is for Developer edition. Unlike many others who installed this version, I was fully aware that this developer edition could have some problems with plug-ins. Here are my findings of the first days playing around.
Dashboard
The first screen of the MT interface clearly shows a new item: the Movable Type News box. This box syndicates news from the Movable Type web site. Since I prefer to read my news in my feed reader, I immediately removed this box.
Another thing changed in the main screen is the direct access to some weblog features. The 2.x versions had for each weblog links to create a new entry and to enter the entries list. Now you can also access the comments list, the templates list and the weblog configuration screen. The one thing I am missing here is the upload file feature, since I assume that bloggers will more often upload an image than tinker with their templates.
Edit Entry
Also the Entry Edit screen has some —minor— modifications. It is now possible to specify the entry date & time the moment you create a new entry. In the older versions you first had to save your entry to modify the publishing time. That leaves only one feature that cannot be modified in new entries: the multiple categories.
Another change is that the edit buttons now also work in Mozilla based browsers, but only for the entry body. If you use the extended entry field, you still have to enter the HTML code yourself.
Comments
The comments list is new and handy feature to manage your comments. You can see the details and the status of the last comments, and open them from that screen. You can filter comments on e-mail, name and IP address, but unfortunately not on status. I don’t receive many comments, but I assume that more popular sites would love to see only the comments that are pending for approval.
Trackback
In my definition, trackbacks are nothing more than comments on my entries left on other sites. I would like to treat trackbacks in exactly the same way as comments, but unfortunately trackbacks do not have status information.
Plug-ins
Of the 13 plug-ins I use for this site, I removed two after upgrading. MT-Blacklist is not compatible with MT3.0, so I am removing comment spammers by hand again.
The Optional-Redirect plug-in is not necessary anymore, since the same can be achieved in MT 3.0 by no_redirect=“1”.
All other plug-ins work the same way as before.
Individual Archive template
Most of my time went into trying to adjust the individual archive template. There have been many changes to this template to incorporate the TypeKey service, but I have not yet been able to get them to work when served as XHTML 1.1 with MIME type application/xhtml+xml. The smallest problem was to validate the template as XHTML 1.1. The new code uses some names, which I changed into ids, and I had to edit lib/MT/Template/Context.pm so it won’t use valign and border anymore – look at line 1476.
A bigger problem is the JavaScript. Things like document.comments_form.email.value is easy enough changed into document.getElementById(‘email’).value, but I don’t know how to fix document.write so it works both on text/html as on application/xhtml+xml.
The last problem I have with my template is that it shows the wrong comment form; the one that is normally used when TypeKey authentication is obligatory. I still have to find out what is going wrong here.
