Moving Movable Type

After a few years of dragging my heels, I finally bit the bullet and upgraded Movable Type yesterday— from 3.16 to 4.31, skipping several generations of the software that have come in between. It was either that or switch to WordPress, and I thought I’d give MT one more try to see what the new one can do. It was a surprisingly painless process, but hunting around for instructions on the interim steps took a while—most people have long since left MT3.x behind. I thought I’d post what I found here, in case anyone else is still looking to do the same.

The process was complicated by my never having moved the back-end from Berkeley DB to MySQL, so the first step was to create a new MySQL database on my server for that purpose, then to follow these instructions hidden in the SixApart archives. One thing I needed to do was track down my old zip file with the 3.16 package and look in it for mt-db2sql.cgi, which I hadn’t uploaded to the server back in the day. With that uploaded and made executable along with its partner file mt-db-pass.cgi, I was ready to go.

The conversion went off without a hitch—fortunately I didn’t need to use these modifications for people with particularly large databases, thanks to my habit of making new blogs for each year and freezing the old ones as static files so I could remove them from the database. The conversion even cleaned up a weird ghost double of one of the blogs in the database, which was handy. Now I was ready for the bigger move. I’d uploaded the files for MT4.31 into a new folder alongside the old MT3.16 folder so that I could keep the old one on hand in case the move didn’t work. One of the nice things about this process was that my old Berkeley database was still intact, too, as it wouldn’t be touched in the changeover. (Naturally, I’d made backups of all of these as well.)

One file that needed moving across from MT3.16 was mt.cfg, as modified to reflect the new MySQL settings. I saved a copy of this, changed the name to mt-config.cgi, inserted a line with DBPassword (to replace mt-db-pass.cgi), and uploaded it into the MT4.31 folder.

Now it was just a case of making sure all the new CGI files had their permissions set to 755, changing the names of the two MT folders so that the old one became the back-up and the new one became the main MT folder, and pointing my browser at the usual location of mt.cgi. Movable Type 4.31 identified the need for an upgrade automatically and performed it without a hitch. So that’s it; I’m now safely in the new version, wondering where on earth everything is... nah, it’s looking fine so far, and seems to have lots of useful new features.

I’m not sure how it’s going to handle the old 3.16 templates, and this post is partly a test of that. Over time I’ll look at modifying them to use more of the features of MT4.x, but one thing at a time...

13 September 2009 · Site News