Despite Six Apart’s warm promises of the easiest upgrade ever, upgrading to Movabletype to version 3.2 is everything but painless. I’m not sure how well their strategy goes, leaving enough users out there without a clue, hoping they will be drawn to buy the most expensive upgrade version with included technical support.
There is some sort of support through the MT knowledge base and the MT community forum, and of course, you can always find bits and pieces on the internet. All sorts of puzzle parts of information are cluttered around on the net, you’ll find them in various blogs and wikis online. I don’t know how many Google searches I’ve done already, desperately trying to move forward. It feels like walking in a swamp. Along the way, I have consulted Elise’s incredibly helpful tutorial site for various times and spent half a night unsuccessfully trying to make a full backup using TypeMover. It’s a plugin that’s supposed to backup everything of a Movabletype installation, including all your blog comments, commenters data, categories and everything else that’s not stored in a MySQL database, if you haven’t turned on dynamic template rebuilds. Speaking of, those don’t work either in the case of dense, because in order to make them work, I would have to get access to the Apache configuration. Which is of course maintained by my host, and that is probably the same case with the majority of Movabletype users, since we don’t all have our very own web server, hosting our sites from our kitchen desk.
So why am I going through this painful upgrade you may ask? The new features of Movabletype 3.2 are nice, but what is really convincing is its new anti-spam functionality. According to Six Apart, that alone will be worth all the hassle. For the past month I have spent an increasing time with blocking off unsoliticed comments by some very persistent texas casino websites. All the time I kept asking myself if this was some sort of private revenge of Mr. Bush’s clan, a personal raid following my continued comments about his failure as politician and leader of the United States.
Six Apart says it’s the easiest upgrade ever. But apparently I’m not the only one having problems:
cantoni.org
Blogging: MT 3.2 Final - 500 Error Bites
MovableType Weirdness Again
mistressmaryse in the MT forums: “Moveable Type development team: Your software is the MOST difficult installation that I have ever attempted to perform on my website.”
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