After much pain, I've upgrade to the MT 4 version of Movable Type. And true to form, Movable Type is the largest pile of crap on the face of the planet. I was upgrading from 3.3, and while initially everything seemed fine, it turns out that really... MT can't handle large blogs very well. Comments went wonky, archives got hosed, etc. It's still not working properly -- comments come in fine, but no matter how hard I try to publish said comments, they never actually show up on the main page. The only way I found to get new comments to show up was to no longer statically generate all of the pages, but that came with its own set of problems (such as not honoring any of the template content!).
So for now, your comments probably won't appear like you'd expect them to -- but don't let that divert you from leaving them! I do get the comments, and eventually they will show up when this pile of crap is functional.
Needless to say, I am disgusted with Movable Type. If anyone is an MT expert and would like to take a crack at helping me solve these issues, shoot me an email, or send me a comment. If all else fails, I'll just switch back to the old version of MT. Sorry about the inconvenience!
Huttah! After a bit more wrangling, I figured out what settings to monkey with to get it so that comments finally show up again in an expected manner. It turns out that if you select to have a cron job running, it relies on the cron job to do all of the work. I was under the impression the background job was to publish scheduled items, not to do everything. After turning that setting off, the comments magically started working (as did actually posting this new entry, which originally never hit the main page)! So now there's a bit more visual tweaks left to do, but the major functionality should be working.
I still stand by my statement that MT is a pile of crap though. It should not take six hours to upgrade your blogging software.
Hello Aaron,
Maybe give WordPress a try. I think you will find an import function to do this.
Cheers
Thomas Herold
CEO Dream Manifesto
http://www.dreammanifesto.com
Wrestling with Movable Type is one of the reasons I wrote Tangelo. :)
@Thomas -- I used to use WP, but had a ton of problems with them as well. MT works *really* well once it's setup, and getting it setup is horrible. What I found with WP was the opposite -- very trivial to set up, but once it was up, it was a fair amount of work. I've gotten exactly *zero* comment spams with MT, but with WP, it was a constant battle closing the holes that allowed spammers to post w/o hitting the moderation queue. I also had to do a lot of work to get the site actually looking proper under WP because their templates were pretty bad...
I'm loathe to switch back to WP, but I do keep the option in the back of my mind on days like today. ;-)
I never really quite understood the popularity of either of MT or WP. Why muck about with a database? It's just a blog! I've been using Simple PHP Blog for a couple years now. It's totally portable, a cinch to set up, and I have yet to have a problem with it. It just works. I highly recommend giving it a whirl.
http://www.simplephpblog.com/
Cheers
New servers AND new software all in one week -- you're a brave man. :o)
One thing about the new layout. It doesn't wrap the text if you narrow your window. I'm a big fan of narrow windows for text-heavy content. I find it much easier to scan and read in a narrow column -- kinda like newspaper columns. For myself, I find scanning lots of long lines tiring (and less productive).
(It's why I gave up on the real basic forums a few months ago after the re-design -- it forced a wide view which took longer to scan and more effort to read. Just wasn't worth the extra work. Well that and some of the best sources of info on the forums were moved back to do their real jobs at RS.)
Good luck with the new servers and the new software.
@Kirk -- I am a daring man, what can I say? :-P And you're right, the text doesn't wrap, which is quite annoying. I'll look into fixing that. I think that'll just be a CSS change (god I hope so, given how long it takes to rebuild all of the entries).
Well -- down to just two problems. 1) Any posts before the "New Server" post don't seem to allow any comments. 2) I can't figure out the CSS to get the content to wrap instead of just scrolling. It's currently a fixed-width field (940px total, 190px for the column on the right and the rest for the actual content). But outside of that, I don't know of any other issues. If you find some, please leave a comment so I can look into it. Thanks!
I don't know if you've considered this already but I use Tumblr. Always there, always working, plenty of fine features, simple, etc.. Hell, you can even tie it to your domain. I'm not quite sure if it allows comments though. Nobody reads my blog anyways (it's not meant to be read by the masses though).
I would shop around for other software and services that might fit you better. opensourcecms is a good place to start. You can test drive all of them without installing anything.
Ok! Here's the latest! Comments should now be enabled on all of the older posts, not just the newest ones. Unfortunately, I cannot find a way to get the main content area to wrap. CSS honors static areas before dynamic ones -- so it's either an ugly layout or non-wrapping text. Sorry, but this is probably just going to have to remain this way. At least the content area does fit on an 800x600 screen (just barely). If anyone finds other issues, be sure to let me know. Thanks!