Mumbling Again

Upgrading my MovableType install to 3.3

With the release of MovableType 3.3 it became free again to personal bloggers. This was great news to me since MT 2.6 was starting to feel very outdated and could barely keep away the comment spam even with MT-Scode installed. I had considered porting everything over to Word Press but that seemed like a hassle and was my last resort. The upgrade was a complete success, though I had to disable MT-Scode rather than deal with debugging it. No loss there though since MT 3.3 has great features built-in to combat comment and ping spam.

Upgrading was a cinch. I'll admit the hard part was done for me already since cron fires off a script to rsync all my important stuff to another machine which then runs daily incremental backups. It seemed fool-proof to try the upgrade. If it didn't work out I could very easily revert to my old installation.

First I downloaded the new files and unzipped them to my cgi-bin directory. I renamed my old mt dir to mt-2.6.1. Now I could safely name the new install's dir mt in its place. The installation instructions for upgrading tell you what to copy over from the old dir to the new one. I did this and made some minor changes to the new install's config file. I hit the server in my browser and was greeted with the upgrade page.

I'll admit, I didn't expect things to go so well and I was impressed with how far along MT has come. The only snag I hit was when rebuilding, my site lacked the comments forms. I checked the MT logs and realized that something was wrong with the MT-Scode plugin. I tried to troubleshoot it for about 10 minutes before I realized that I no longer needed it. Thanks go out to Brad Choate and the Six Apart team for the incredible SpamLookup plugins that are now bundled with MT!