Movable Type Upgrade

As I mentioned in passing last week, I’ve upgraded this site to the latest version of Movable Type. But it looks like the upgrade wasn’t as successful as it could have been.

I first noticed problems with the comment features. MT3 gives you the ability to moderate comments from not-registered users. This is all very useful, but as all my comment templates were from MT2 the site didn’t have any support for people wanting to register and therefore I was having to approve all comments.

So I found this page which tells you all the changes that you need to make to MT2 templates to enable all the MT3 features. Well I’m sure I followed all of the instructions, but it wasn’t a major success.

Then I had a brainwave. It was only really the main index template and the stylesheet that I’d changed so I could overwrite all of the other templates with the real MT3 ones and it would all just work, right? Well, wrong as it turns out.

Oh, I got all the new features but it looked horrible. The way that the pages interact with the stylesheet has changed completely in MT3 (it’s got a lot simpler) so my stylesheet no longer had the right selectors for the new pages. And if I used the new stylesheet it would break the look of my front page.

So in the end I decided to go the whole way and use the default MT3 stylesheet and main index template as well. Which explains why this page suddenly different and a load of stuff has gone missing from the front page. I took copies of the old ones before I did it, so I’ll be adding stuff back over the next week or so.

I was planning a major redesign at some point soon. I just wasn’t expected to be forced into it like this.

But the site now all works as expected. If you have a TypeKey login then you can now comment without moderation.

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