Movable Type version 2.63…
I think the migration to version 2.63 of my Movable Type weblog management system from version 2.21 is now complete (for richard’s ramblings, at least). Whew! Several upgrade steps were skipped and I went directly from the old version to the new one, skipping versions 2.5, 2.51, 2.6, 2.61, and 2.62.
I’m glad I made the decision to wait because this version seems to be much more stable than the minor releases 2.5 and 2.6 — but then again it always seems that the major and minor versions of just about ANY software have significant bugs in them upon release. To finish the migration, all of the existing templates had to be edited and several new ones had to be created. Even the default templates that came with the new version had bugs that I had to fix before I could complete the upgrade. The most important new features visible to the the everyday surfer are trackback pinging (the ability to know when and where other weblogs reference mine) and search, both of which seem to be working now.
Plus, I’ve made a few minor tweaks to the UI here and there. Little stuff, mainly — move a link, add a date, increase spacing by a few pixels, modify a border, etc.
Now on to completing the family weblog page and the geocaching pages whenever I feel like getting around to those…
I originally came accross your blog when researching the famous XP fails to install due to *.man file corruption. Over the last few months I have been looking into starting a weblog of my own and I had a short list of three potential solutions. The first was PostNuke which did everything I wanted and also included the “kitchen sink”. I really didn’t want this amount of functionality and felt it would be wasted on my own site. It certainly has a market in the online magazine portal role but not for my personal weblog. The second was Bloxsom which is an incredibly small perl (cgi) script that reads common txt files and builds the webpages around their contents. Again this product works very well as a weblog although care needs to be taken when desiging a directory structure for different subjects or topics. I fell foul of leaving README files in the directory structure and having them appear in the middle of my web pages. Simple to use but just a little too simple as I wanted something a bit more functional than just parsing txt files. The third and final contender was a late entrant due to a second look at the blog market after experiencing the sparse but fast Bloxsom. This was Moveable Type. I’ve not had time to test it yet but from what I have read in the manual and from the example sites I have seen (including Richard’s Ramblings), this could be the product to use. Good clean lines, a web form to input my own ramblings and the option to shoe horn it into my own site without having the kitchen sink installed by default. So thanks, Richard, for an interesting few hours reading your posts and helping me to make a decision on what to test next in my search for a suitable blogger app. Regards, Nick. W
I really like it! It has a few major flaws in the default templates and stylesheets, so I’ve had to do a lot of UI tweaking for the pages to show up properly. However, the CMS software itself has been flawless. Never had an error. Never had a problem. It’s a great turnkey solution. - RDL
MT is still really good software, but I’ve obviously moved this blog over to the superior WordPress since then.
Since Movable Type is now at version 4.x and all my blogs have been migrated over to WordPress, I think it’s time to close this obsolete page for comments.