July 31, 2005

Michael's unfortunate blog meltdown (he lost about ten days of posts!) prompted me to do a full backup of this blog (database plus entire MT folder). And then I figured, as long as that was done, I had nothing to lose by trying to upgrade to the latest beta version of Movable Type. My previous efforts at upgrading Movable Type were fraught with troubles and sorrow.

But this upgrade went absolutely without a hitch! I couldn't believe it. The whole thing only took 30 minutes, and it only took that long because I was treading very lightly, checking everything twice before acting.

[UPDATE: After all my bragging about the flawless upgrade, I tried to install a plugin and shot the hole thing to hell. Down came the whole house of cards. I had to restore everything from the backups. Oh well. I think I'm going to wait a while before toying with plugins.]

Ultimately, all I did was -- wham, bam! -- upload everything all at once onto the server. I knew I had my old installation backed up on my hard drive so I didn't have to worry. Worked beautifully (but don't upload the 'mt.cfg' file).

You no longer have to find and run the upgrade scripts. You just go to your start page as always and you get a message saying "Looks like you need to upgrade" (or something) then you click the "Upgrade" button and the rest is done automatically. Of course, it didn't work the first time, but from previous struggles with this sort of thing I knew this was because I needed to tweak some file permissions. So here's my advice:

Upgrade advice:

Backup!!! Don't shrug this off. Do it! Do an export from within MT. But also export your entire database using PhpMyAdmin and also download your entire MT folder. The resulting peace of mind will set you free and make you feel that anything is possible (or maybe that's the Zoloft).

When you get an error during the upgrade process you should assume it's a file permission thing. This is not a 'problem' or a 'hitch' as far as I'm concerned, but a normal (potential) part of the upgrade process. So just take note of the file that your browser stalled on (it was 'upgrade.cgi', logically enough, and then...I forgot what after that) and set the permission to '755' (or 'rwx-rx-rx'). You might need to do the same thing if something doesn't function right while you're testing after the upgrade process.

Don't overwrite your mt.cfg file. You don't have to upgrade this, I don't think. If you overwrote it by mistake (I did) all you have to is re-upload the version you backed up (good example of why step 1 is a life saver).

"What's it like?" you ask? I love the way the new version looks for one thing. The setup is more logical and easier to navigate. You can list commenters and easily find all their comments. The rebuild process is much faster. There are undoubtedly other improvements that I haven't explored yet. I haven't tested the use of dynamic archives yet (not sure I will either). I'm toying with turning on trackbacks again to see if that feature is less vulnerable to spam now.

Mostly I'm just delighted at how painless the upgrade process was because now I no longer have to fear keeping up with the latest version.

UPDATE: I initially had a problem staying logged in: every time I clicked on a new page or link in my MT screen I'd get a message that my session had timed out and I'd have to log in again. I finally guessed that I might need to delete the cookies still saved from the previous version of MT. Sure enough, that did it. So delete them cookies.

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