Last week Six Apart released the beta for Movable Type version 4. Until last weekend I didn’t have the time to have a look at it, but Sunday I downloaded the files and copied them to my server.
Of course things went wrong, as was to be expected with a beta release. I know that you never should install beta releases on a production environment, but I took the risk anyway as this weblog is partly a playing ground. I am a long-time Movable Type user, and suspect that my database is full of legacy data of old settings and plugins.
After copying the files, I went to the new MT Dashboard, and found out that all images had been scrambled. I suspected that my FTP application accidentally had uploaded them in ASCII mode, so copied them again in binary mode, without result. I checked the files I had downloaded from Six Apart, and yes, they were scrambled as well. So I downloaded the tar.gz file instead of the zip, uploaded the images again, and the images came up correctly.
The second problem I encountered was more serious. The dashboard showed up OK, but whenever I tried to access one of the blogs, I got an error message:
invalid permissions for author 1 at lib/MT/Author.pm line 337
This one took a little bit more to solve, but at the end I found out that newly created users don’t have this problem. After comparing all settings in the database between my old users and the new user, I found the culprit: In the table ‘mt_permission’ I found duplicate record for my user ID with permision_blog_id = 0. After removing the duplicate records, the error did not appear any more.
Now I am able to get into my blogs, and as you see, write new items. However, as soon as I publish a new entry I get another error message: Fallback Is Required At Lib/mt/util.pm Line 1331. I haven’t solved this error yet, but found out that I can simply rebuild my site to make the entry appear.
As you can see, I also changed the design of the site. I was getting fed up with the previous design, and at the same time wanted to see what new template features came with MT4, so I reset the templates to the new minimalist theme. The coming days I will be studying and tweaking this design to my own tastes, so things might change a little bit.
One thing I noticed already is that the default templates do not use the widget manager, basically because the new sidebar template module offers filtering by template type, giving the possibility to show a different sidebar on different types of pages.
Other things they copied from WordPress are Pages and a file manager (with tagging!!!).
There are still some other things to be fixed, such as activating trackbacks. In the blog’s configuration I see that this has been deactivated on a system level, which is not the case. So far I like MT4 a lot. It is fast, pleasant looking and I am happy with new features such as the file manager, entry auto-save and interactive template errors.
