August 27, 2005

Upgraded to Movable Type 3.2

This week I upgraded to the new Movable Type version 3.2 and the new anti-spam features are simply phenominal. Now all tracebacks are moderated as well as comments, plus there is spam filtering built in for both tracebacks and comments.
The updated software has already automatically stopped all the most recent comment and traceback spam attacks on my weblog in the last few days, so it already gets my vote of confidence.

The one feature I haven't quite been able to use yet in the new version is the entry basename feature allowing entries to have more human readable URLs than 000365.html
The problem I have is working out how to use the old (entry-number based) URLs for previous entries while using the new basename feature for new entries going forward. I particularly want to avoid breaking all the old links - which of course would be very UNCOOL. Anyway, I'll investigate some more before logging a support ticket with Six Apart.

Following my principle of paying for software that is useful and productive (for example, I already had a donors license from before MT went commercial, and for a long time I've had a paid license for WinZip!), I have now ante-ed up and paid the license fee for the upgraded version.

If you are using MT, you should definitely upgrade to 3.2!

Entry categories: Weblog
Posted by Jorgen Thelin at August 27, 2005 12:00 AM - [PermaLink]
 
Comments
I too have the same problem with basename feature. For me, I don't want basename feature. I want the filename short, even if it's not "human-friendly". I already submitted a ticket. :-) Posted by: Antony Shen on August 29, 2005 04:38 AM
I ran into this problem (well, one similar) quite awhile back, and found a great solution on... some site I can't find right now. Anyway, I'm not in any way claiming to be the brilliant blogger who came up with this. OK, so the basic idea is that you use an .htaccess file to redirect requests for the old URL to the new one. Of course, doing this manually would be a pain, so you cleverly use MT to generate the .htaccess file for you. Create a new template file and have it output to myredirects.txt or something. Then put this as the template body (obviously use less-than and greater-than): [MTEntries] Redirect http://www.thearchitect.co.uk/weblog/archives/[MTEntryDate format="%Y/%m"]/[MTEntryID pad="1"].html http://www.thearchitect.co.uk/weblog/archives/[MTEntryDate format="%Y/%m"]/[MTEntryTitle trim_to="15" dirify="1"].html [/MTEntries] Ta-da! Just paste the output into your .htaccess file and plop that in the domain root, rebuild, and viola -- no broken links, you can use custom basenames on new entries, and old entries will have the old-fashioned, truncated sort of basename (which is still the default if you don't enter something in the basename field). Cheers! Posted by: Becky on September 18, 2005 07:32 PM