338 words on Software
I just upgraded to version 3.1 of Movable Type. As MT upgrades are usually a pain, I didn’t want to do that to begin with. But then, I’m seeing so much comment spam these days that I wanted to try the MTBlacklist plugin to fight it. And that in turn only seems to work with MT versions 2.6 or 3.1. So there I am.
MT didn’t disappoint and the upgrade was the usual painful experience: Copying files to different locations on the FTP servers. Excessive amounts of files it seems to me. In obscure folder hierarchies, which I don’t understand, I might add – there’s a bit of a Linuxy feel to it with all those lib or extlib folders, whatever they are for. And of course being careful during the whole operation.
To add injury to insult, the upgrade script didn’t work, giving an error message An error occurred while upgrading the schema: …
. That’s when the swearing – and sweating starts. Luckily nothing bad happened and some good people already figured out how to fix the bug. Lets just say that editing a perl file wasn’t on my agenda for today.
The problem seems to be that they forgot to require a module to be present before issuing some commands. I assume this is similar to having to load header files of other classes in C. And it’s a friggin nuisance. This whole concept is just there to make peoples’ lives more painful – and to create circular references (how much time have people wasted trying to avoid those?). Why can’t the computer just figure out which files it needs?
As for the other new features in this upgrade – I don’t really care. I don’t want to tinker with my templates once again. Another thing I find really strange about MT is how it always claims to be version 1.2 at the bottom of its pages. I don’t get that joke.
MTBlacklist looks good so far. Let’s hope it does its job equally well.
Apparently the upgrading problem has been resolved in the 3.1.1 update to Movable Type.
Another side effect I saw from upgrading was that my templates were overwritten by older version. I have no idea how that could happen but it did. Thankfully there was a backup around.
