Movable Type Demo

 Just a test to see how HTML entities appear in an RSS feed.

My version of Movable Type offers 6 different format types:

1. None


2. Convert Line Breaks


3. Markdown


4. Markdown with SmartyPants


5. Rich Text (I replaced the default with FCKEditor)


6. Textile 2

A few things to note:

• You can easily disable Markdown, Markdown with SmartyPants, and Textile 2 via System Overview--Plugins


• Once you've changed an entry to Rich Text (or started an entry as Rich Text), you can't really change it back to one of the other options.

Personally, I would like to remove all options other than Rich Text. I have not yet found a simple way to do that

I am about to insert an image where I use the filename as both the title and the description.

 Now I will insert the same image again, after changing the label and the description on the Manage Assets page.

 The first has the original alt attribute (the filename), whereas the second has the new alt attribute. Changing the label and/or description has no effect on the alt attribute of images already places on an entry or page.

How does Movable Type handle multiword tags?

It's easy to add a multiword tag--you don't even need quotes. Tags are separated by commas.

In the database the tag is stored in mt_tag table. The tag_name field stores the human-readable label.

The mt_entry table joins to the mt_tag table via mt_objecttag:

• mt_entry.entry_id is mt_objecttag.objecttag_object_id
• mt_tag.tag_id is mt_objecttag.objecttag_tag_id

Adding a multiword tag actually adds 2 entries to the mt_tag table:

• A "normalized" entry that removes spaces and special characters and lowercases the string
• The regular version, which references the normalized version in the tag_n8d_id field.

More you should know about tags:

• Tags can be associated with assets, pages, or entries. A tag associated with one is not available to be applied to the others; an identical tag must be created.
• Tags must be associated with one of those 3 items. You cannot prepopulate tags for a given blog (as far as I can tell).

Thanks to a tip from the Movable Type forums, it turns out that PerlMagick was the missing ingredient to get ImageMagick to work with Movable Type.

(The message on the tools page could be improved to let users know that.)

Now, let's try it out:

Full size

Resized in the rich-text editor

Thumbnail

This is another issue I noticed after migrating to the new server:

Mail::Sendmail

Your server does not have Mail::Sendmail installed, or Mail::Sendmail requires another module that is not installed. This module is required for sending mail via SMTP Server. Please consult the installation instructions for help in installing Mail::Sendmail.

I renamed the mt-config.cgi file and ran the installation wizard (mt-wizard.cgi) again. The wizard successfully sent a test e-mail, so it must have found Sendmail, but the mt-check.cgi page does not reflect that.

I would love to see what ImageMagick can do for Movable Type. My server says it has ImageMagick installed:

#yum list installed | grep "Image"
ImageMagick.i386                         6.3.5.9-1.1eapps       installed

The usual suspects are in /usr/bin, e.g. convert and mogrify.

Unfortunately, the mt-check.cgi page says otherwise:

Image::Magick

Your server does not have Image::Magick installed, or Image::Magick requires another module that is not installed. This module is needed if you would like to be able to create thumbnails of uploaded images. Please consult the installation instructions for help in installing Image::Magick.

I have no idea why Movable Type isn't finding it or how to give it proper directions.

I recently migrated osric.org from a Fedora Core to a CentOS5 server. There was one hiccup along the way: apparently the groups on the old server didn't exactly match the groups on the new server, so I got internal server error 500 when attempting to log in.

The error logs showed that there was an issue with suexec, and the suexec log (in the Apache log directory) showed the mismatch. Once I changed the group on the files and the directories, everything worked again.

[update]: not quite everything--on the System Information page I'm getting the following error:

Movable Type could not find the script named 'mt-check.cgi'. To resolve this issue, please ensure that the mt-check.cgi script exists and/or the CheckScript configuration parameter references it properly.

Which is strange, because I can access that file directly via a web browser.

[update x2]: I fixed the System Info issue by installing HTML-Parser.