Upgrade to Movable Type 4 (beta)

I upgraded the engine that powers this blog to Movable Type 4 beta.

Note: Six Apart points out this software is beta software. It is not recommended for production use.

Having said that: it seems to work fine for me. I looked for upgrade documentation, but I was unable to find that. Just pretend like you are doing a fresh install, and it will all work out just fine. Do not forget to make a backup copy of your existing software, your existing site, and of your database before you start. I didn't need it, but having a good back-out scenario is always a good thing :)

I encountered a few glitches, but those were easily fixable.

I had to update file permissions in the filesystem. MT4 wants to write a configuration file in your mt-scripts directory, so that needs to be writable for the user that runs the web server. Do not forget to remove these permissions once the file is written!

My Apache server was configured fairly tightly and because of that, I got Internal Server Errors in detailed entry views. Configuring the directory that contains the website to AllowOverride +Indexes fixed that.

Once this was all done, my site was up and running without problems. While I didn't run into anything that was unfixable, others did, so please make sure that you have your rollback scenario ready before you start the upgrade.

The management interface looks very different than the previous version's did, and I haven't decided yet if I like it. My initial feeling tells me that Six Apart went a little overboard in the CSS realm, but that might be a matter of getting used to.

My biggest issue so far is that the spam filter does not seem to be as good as the old one. Significantly more spam trackbacks are getting through; something that didn't bother me before.

Another bug: If you assign categories to your post and then hit 'Preview' without hitting 'Save' first, you loose those categories.