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February 10, 2010

By Reza Muhammad

3 Comments, No TrackBacks

Little Tips on Upgrading to MovableType 5

I have to admit, I don't exactly follow MovableType's progress.  Even though I am using MT for my blog, I hardly pay attention anything related to it.  Yesterday, I decided to upgrade my blog to the latest MovableType release.  As I went to MT's website, MovableType 5 is the current available release.  So I downloaded that.  Without reading too much about what changes and what not, I simply read what the upgrade process was like.

When I upgraded, I only made a physical backup of my blog, but not the database since I read that there's a mt-upgrade.cgi file where it will upgrade the database for you (super!). After the upgrading process finished, I was puzzled.  The admin look is totally different, and apparently MT5 has a different way of treating blogs than MT4.

Blogs, or Websites? Hmm..

In MT4, once you installed MovableType, you start by creating a blog, and you're ready to blog right away.  This behaviour changes in MT5

In MT5, I need to have a website first before I can have a blog. Within a website I can create multiple blogs.  Websites and blogs should have different URL.  If they are the same, the first published site (or blog) will be the one that's  available from the browser.

Creating a Website

To create a website, I went to the admin panel and click on "Create a Website".  If I only wanted to have a blog, I still need to create a website first.  I inserted the URL of the website (it is the same as my blog URL), the Root of the website (also the same with my Blog Root), then I clicked "Save", but I did not publish the website.  After the website is created, I can create a blog.

Creating a Blog

In the dashboard page of the admin panel, I can now see my new created website.  Within the website, there is a button called "New Blog".  I clicked that and it lets me input my blog information.

I use the same name for my blog as I did for my website (Reza Muhammad), my blog url is the same as my website url (http://rezmuh.sixceedinc.com), and my blog root is also the same as my website. Then I clicked "Create".

After the new blog is created, then I can publish the blog.  At this point, I have a new blog running on MT5.  

Restoring Old Blog Entries and Comments

What I noticed after my blog is running is that all of my blog entries from MT4 exists on the table, but I cannot access it from the admin panel.  To restore all of my blog entries and comments (which are not alot, as you can see), here's what I did:

  1. Go to your blog in the admin panel, then you will see that the address bar is something like: http://domain_name/mt-directory/mt.cgi?__mode=dashboard&blog_id=<blog_id_number>.  Now, the reason why my entries and comments are not shown is because my old blog_id is different than my new blog_id.
  2. To make my entries show, I went into the SQL command prompt (I use PostgreSQL), I did: UPDATE mt_entry SET entry_blog_id = <blog_id_number>;
  3. The last thing I need is to also make my old coments shown.  For that, I did: UPDATE mt_comment SET comment_blog_id = <blog_id_number>;
That was all I had to do.  After I did those two steps, my old entries and comments are now back :)

If you happen to have a similar problem as I was, this post will probably help you. I have a hard time looking for MT5 documentation, so this tip will hopefully also help me in the future in case of similar problem arises.

Tags: Tags: MovableType, MT5, Upgrading MovableType

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TrackBack URL: http://rezmuh.sixceedinc.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/10

3 Comments

I have a question. this movable type is kind of wordpress right? I mean kind of CMS. may I know which hosting provider that you use to host your movable type. I just want to know. anyway it's nice reading your blog. :-)

jacobian | February 12, 2010 9:13 PM | Reply

Salam kenal Jacobian,

you're right, Movable Type is a blogging platform / cms like Wordpress. They alot of similarities but (with Movable Type 5) also has alot of differences.

One of the technical differences between them is that MT is written in Perl. If i'm not mistaken, Perl web app can run on CGI, FastCGI or mod_perl. So any hosting companies who provides any of those methods will run Movable Type just fine. But, running Movable Type with mod_perl 2 is not as easy as it should have been.

As for my hosting provider, I host my domains with Magnet Hosting (www.magnet-id.com). It is located in Indonesia.

Author Profile Page Reza Muhammad | February 12, 2010 10:39 PM | Reply

Senang melihat ada yg menggunakan MT disini. Salam kenal.

Eko | August 7, 2010 2:57 PM | Reply

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