After playing with the beta build on a couple of systems, I finally updated this site to the new Movable Type 3.2 release. It was a little more complicated that I had hoped, but I was being extra careful and tried running in a “staging” location first. I started down the path of creating a brand new instance to get the new templates, but it didn’t look simple to copy over all my settings manually.
Here’s the sequence I finally used:
- Backup everything
- Convert data from Berkeley (DB_File) format to MySQL; I had been meaning to do this for a while and the upgrade was failing without it
- Installed new MT 3.2 files in version-specific directories
- Set up symbolic links for ‘mt’ and ‘mt-static’ to point to 3.2 rather than 3.14
- Review/edit mt-config.cgi with correct settings
- Ran mt-check.cgi to confirm everything was good (I had to fix one line in this that was causing a Perl warning and a 500 server error code)
- Ran mt.cgi which directed me to mt-upgrade.cgi, upgrading the database (which went smoothly)
- Reviewed weblog settings to make sure everything came over (it did) and to explore the new 3.2 options
- Rebuilt the entire site
- Edited the CSS so that edit boxes use a fixed-width font (Lucida Console)
So far, so good! Next step will be to revisit all my templates to see if I should revert to the standard ones. (Mine were hacked together when I first switched to MovableType.) The new StyleSwitcher looks interesting, but I haven’t been able to make it work just yet.