Whykay's happenings

MT4.0 - What I think of it

Ok, I just installed MT4.0 to see what's so different on it, since I have not checked new blogging tools for awhile. The set up was painless, also thanks to Dreamhost for its easy-to-setup mysql databases.

What started this off was checking what the "export" does in MT2.6. It gave me a wee (or big enough) text file. So I was wondering what it would look like in MT4.0. So off I went to download it and copied to my server space. Ran the setup, as I said earlier, was a sinch. All in all, got my first blog post in, it was more automatically posted when I set up the blog.

I then imported the MT2.6 file, everything went swimmingly, and then realised that I needed to "publish" the site before anyone can see anything! It's that same age-old issue I had with MT, you have to publish everytime you did something, anything. Which is lame. In Wordpress, for example, I just post something and it publishes it (and can be draft if I wanted). The main thing is, it does not ask you to publish, republish every time you do something to an entry, templates, css, etc. In MT's case, it's publish, wait, check site, publish, wait... *sigh

Anyhoo, once I published some of my entries (as I have over 800 entries, and it kept timing out from the processing), it appeared fine when I viewed the site.

The admin interface has been vastly improved, they even have an editor that highlights the syntax and includes line numbers. Handy indeed. Erm, I wanted to include some code that is used to pull a list from a text file that is generated every few minutes or so, of posts from the Irish Born Chinese Forum. I figured out the widgets, nothing too taxing, and got it included (once I figured out where the widget goes). Published the templates, cos of the changes. Viewed the site, the latest entries from the forum appeared, huzzah!

The good news ends here, I noticed that the latest entries from the forum has not been updated, you have to republish the index pages for it to pick it up, which is not the point of pulling posts from the forum at all! It was find in MT2.6, it just pulls the file contents, but it seems to have changed in behaviour for MT4.0. I was hoping to switch to MT4.0, but this little setback is a little annoying. Maybe there is a way around it?

Posted by whykay at May 23, 2008 08:49 PM