Movable Type 3.1 is finally out. Why should anyone care? It’d be easy to be snide and mutter something about having jumped ship to WordPress long ago. It’d also be easy to note that MT3.1’s release marks the first time MT’s been available to end users in three months (3.0 was a ‘developer’ release, but they nevertheless pulled 2.661… then updated all the sample stylesheets without telling anyone. Which was all a bit braindead, frankly).
Anyway, rants aside, 3.1 is out. Shortly – perhaps as soon as this evening – I shall move quernstone.com over to it, and try out all the gee-whizz new stuff. Particularly the comment blacklisting features.
Once I’m happy it works, I’d be delighted to upgrade the blogs of my hostees on deletetheweb.com, at your request. Please note:
- Your templates will likely break. I’ll know more when I’ve fiddled a little, but from what I’ve seen the entire layout hierarchy has changed.
- Backups will be mandatory. For which:
- I’ll need access to your blog back-end. Please check if I’m still an author on your installation, and add me if I’m not (then give me admin authorities).
- While MT3.1 costs money, it’s still free for individual private use (within limits). Thanks to a quirk of how I set up deletetheweb.com (ie. badly, at the time), we each fall into this category, so long as we’re sole authors on our blogs.
- I plan to install MT-Blacklist or similar. The comment spam is driving me crazy, too. If I can, I’ll set this up as a shared system, so we each benefit from the others’ blacklists – this used to be possible, I’ll see what I can do.
- When I update your blog, I’ll also port it across to the MySQL back-end. You know that ten-minute wait when you hit ‘rebuild’? It’s history.
- In the event that MT3.1 really narks me – quite likely – I’ll offer instead to move your blog to WordPress. Which has its own problems, but generally works extremely well.
Please note, dear hostee, that I won’t do any of this without your express permission and request.
I’m quite keen to have a look at MT3 (or WordPress – I prefer php to perl) and see what’s what. On the other hand, I’ve installed several plugins and made some fairly drastic changes to my default templates, so getting things running as I currently have them will likely take a fair bit of playing around.
Is there any chance I could have a second blog constructed to play around with?
At your leisure of course – I’m quite happy for you to play guinea pig first.