Upgraded my copy of Movable Type blogging software today (I use » Movable Type Open Source) .. to » v4.12, released last month.
Despite using Movable Type since 2003 (beginning with v2.63), this is the first time I've upgraded.
Previous "upgrades" were actually new installations, such as MT v3.35 (in April 2007) and v4.1 (last January), while leaving the old installations of Ye Olde Rad Blog untouched.
Upgrades make me nervous, cuz there's always a chance something might go wrong, and cause me to LOSE all the entries. (MTOS currently hosts ~50 entries.)
Now, with the new VPS, upgrades are easier, cuz I can use the Linux command line, which lets me overwrite old files with a single command. Very powerful .. but dangerous .. if I make a mistake (such as a simple type-o).
••• today's entry continues here below •••
The old way to upgrade (as used with Shared hosting) was to unzip the new version's file on my desktop, and then upload those files (one-at-a-time) to the server. Movable Type contains several thousand files, so this can take a while.
With this upgrade, we're now using the very latest versions of *both* the blog (MTOS 4.12), and the forum (YaBB 222) .. two very cool software packages .. that we've been using for several years. (Forget which one I installed first.)
The blog is nice, cuz it lets me continue longer entries on a separate page, thereby keeping the home page less cluttered.
It also allows me to link to an individual page, made on an individual date, for an individual entry, about an individual topic .. making it easy to reference something previously mentioned. Otherwise, I have only the monthly archives (to link to).
Hyperlinks are what make the web so cool. So they are important. Blog entries allow me to use hyperlinks far more effectively (which I sometimes term "linkage"). This is why the blog is important.
When I logged into the Movable Type interface after overwriting the old files (which is how an upgrade is performed), I saw the welcoming message:
Congratulations! You have successfully upgraded to Movable Type 4.12
Woohoo! .. tho I *did* first have to modify all the *.cgi files (12 of them) to include my server's absolute path. I'm guessing this is cuz I use a very new version of Perl (v5.8.8) on a VPS .. cuz I never had to do this on Shared hosting.
Unzipping the MTOS archive on the Rad server gives a good idea how powerful it is. On my laptop, this operation takes a while. But on the server » it's done in a flash. (Impressive.)
Movable Type is probably the most powerful blogging platform on the planet, up there with WordPress and Expression Engine. I think Six Apart plans to migrate toward becoming a full-blown content management system (CMS), like Joomla or Drupal.
Before concluding, I should note that I use Dreamweaver to craft daily entries .. not the Movable Type blogging interface. Dreamweaver is far more powerful (and faster). Only after an entry is complete (in Dreamweaver) do I transfer it to the blog (via copy-n-paste). That's why you rarely see a blog entry for the current daily entry.
Blogging is something I happen to know a little about.
