I’ve upgraded to MT 4.0.
I thought I’d been smart by trying it locally before upgrading online, but it turned out to be a bit more difficult that I thought it would be. To be fair that’s mostly because I took the opportunity to make a couple of changes. MT 4 has Textile and Markdown built in, including as dynamic php scripts. I know you could install them that way before, but I didn’t want to go to the trouble and that provided a block to using dynamic publishing. So now I’ve enabled dynamic publishing for most indexes and archives other than the entries themselves. I can’t have the entries themselves published dynamically for now because I use php inside entries to publish my photo galleries and that won’t work in dynamic publishing.
I’ve also switched from MTKeyValue to CustomFields. Custom fields isn’t compatible with dynamic publishing either, but it is a bit slicker and I’m working around that for now because I’m only using it to publish the recent photos feature which I publish as a static file that is php-included.
I also started using MTFastsearch and even got it working along side dynamic caching, using mod_rewrite to redirect requests to fastsearch directly to a custom mtview.php script which has the caching disabled. In the process I found out that I don’t entirely understand what is going on with the .htaccess created by dynamic publishing. Many things that I thought should work would not (for instance I had to put the rewrite I just mentioned up at the top right after turning rewrite on), and some things wouldn’t work at all. I seem to have everything but the redirect form the .org site working now.
I also disabled fastcgi for the moment. It seemed to work out of the box, however the memory requirements seem to be even worse than before and I was getting the strange out of memory errors very frequently. The CGI performance doesn’t seem to be too bad right now and we’ll see how things are after the eventual TextDrive transition to Solaris.
All in all, so far, so good. I’ll have to spend some time investigating some of the new features. I got the updated authentication options working (with some difficulty involving the __trans business) except for the option to register directly with the blog, for instance.
Update: One more dynamic publishing snag. It seems that when I delete a comment via the admin interface, the change won’t be reflected on dynamically published pages. It is reflected on static pages, so the actual comment disappears from the entry. But the indexes still publish the cached version with the comment total unchanged. The work around seems to be to jog MT to clear the cache by turning caching off and then back on after deleting a comment. I haven’t tested this with deleting other content, but the process of actually making a comment on the page seems to work just fine.
