tsting 3.14

OK. A long day mostly wasted, but I should now have finally upgraded to MT 3.14. When Six Apart launched MT 3.0 there was a huge flurry of complaint that they had sold out, gone all corporate, etc. But my experience today has been that they have kept many of the good values of their old amateur setup, along with a truly terrible support documentation that even a sourceforge project should be ashamed of.

The good includes the fact that the donations I made in 2002, when I first dicovered how wonderful it was, were remembered and knocked off the price of the upgrade to 3.1. But that turns out to have a bug of the most frustrating sort imaginable. It has, as a major selling point, the ability to serve some pages dynamically, using PHP. This matters when you must otherwise rebuild more than a thousand static pages after a big comment spam attack, or even when yuou change the template. But it turns out that the PHP bits of MT don’t actually read from templates that have been updated. So if there is something they don’t like — and all sorts of plugins don’t work after the upgrade, so that references to them have to be removed — they don’t notice the edit.

there is something about this in the support forums, thogh not in the FAQ. But to log in to the support forums you have to enter an entirely new name ansd password, different from the one that you need to invent to download the software. Of course, it doesn’t say that. Waste ten minutes trying different ombinaitons of somethign you know should work. Then the fourth search claims that all you need do is disable one of the most attractive features of the MT templating setup — the ability to edit your templates in an external file on site. to make PHP work. Except that it doesn’t.

This is the kind of error — where the computer simply ignores your input silently — that I find more frustrating than any other. It is supposed to have been fixed in a release of November last year. It is not fixed. The only remedy is to rebuild all pages statically one more time, and then hope that the dynamic rebuiild will catch up, which it seems to have done.

I hope the site is quicker and more responsive as a result, as well as being easier for me to improve and keep free of spam.