Gee, should I be surprised at this news? Here’s the email I received from my web host when I asked them to upgrade my to 4.2:
Movable Type 4.2 is more strict than Movable Type 4.1 when it comes to custom designed blog templates. We’ve seen some cases when upgrading from version 4.1 to version 4.2 stopped the blog from rebuilding, or when some plugins had to be disabled or upgraded.
If you have a custom blog design, or use custom plugins, I would proceed with caution simply because upgrading might cause your blog to stop working.
If you have a business/company blog, the recommended course of action is to setup a development environment on your hosting account with a duplicate copy of your Movable Type 4.1 blog. Then upgrade that development environment to Movable Type 4.2 and rebuild your blog. Then make a couple of test posts. If it works – Great! You can now safely upgrade your live environment. On the other hand if your blog doesn’t rebuild – it’s time to re-check your templates to make them Movable Type 4.2 friendly.
Right. Like I have the money or time to maintain a development environment for my personal blog.
Sigh – it’s par for the course; I believed them when they said they were going to do better. This is not better, guys. So upgrading is going to wait until I have vacation time to fuck around with my design templates. Lovely.
do you think at some point you’ll wind up moving to wordpress or something else?
or does having MT as a hosted service make it worth it to screw around with MT every time they put out a new release?
i just quit upgrading at some point. i’m not using the hosted MT on my hosting service.
I honestly don’t know at this point. I want to move to Expression Engine, but I’m afraid to break my URLs, because I have some great traffic at some of my pages. I don’t want that to go away. So I’d have to do some really careful management when I ported over, which would take a full time effort for a couple of days to deal with.
I had hoped that Movable Type 4.2 would be the answer to my hopes and dreams. Or at least headaches. After my last round of bitching, Anil Dash wrote to me, and he assured me they had heard customer complaints and were doing everything they could to fix it. That’s really cool, except…
When I was at SXSW listening to the Expression Engine guys, they specifically addressed concerns about problems created by upgrading – they talked about backwards compatibility, about making sure all plug-ins were upgraded before the release went live, about making sure that they were there to support when people have issues and problems.
Six Apart didn’t seem to anticipate any of those problems on their recent upgrade. (And they haven’t in the past, either.)
I’ve been on the Movable Type forum for a week now, asking for help fixing the problems with my xmlrpc script, which was apparently borked by the 4.1 upgrade. I still don’t have an answer – all I have is finger pointing to the delicious upgrade – but their service for the xmlrpc script seems to be working on other blog software.
So I don’t hold out any hope that if things go wrong, I’ll be able to get help from the forums.
My blog is currently hosted by Living Dot. Having them do upgrades really does save some headaches, but they charge a newborn child for bandwidth, so it almost isn’t worth it. I’d like to move commonplacebook.com over to media temple, where I host my expression engine blog stuff, but that’s another several days of work I don’t have free time for.
I’ve been fiddling around with Expression Engine hosted at Media Temple here:
http://electrasteph.com/index.php/fortune/index/
And here:
http://www.naptownargus.com/index.php
Maybe Living Dot doesn’t know what they are talking about because Ihave upgraded at least 10 sites so far without ANY problems. Let me know if you need help.