Movable Type

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Movable Type Summary

Moveable Type is a blog engine written by Six Apart. It was released under the GPL in December 2007. My favorite thing about it is that it renders static output.

Movable Type and FastCGI

I'm trying to get my fork of Movable Type, Mutable Times, to work with mod_fcgid. So far I keep getting errors. Apparently not all the cgi scripts will work with fastcgi period, but I think mt.cgi will.

I just installed:

libfcgi-perl
libfcgi-procmanager-perl
libcgi-fast-perl

apt-get install libfcgi-perl libfcgi-procmanager-perl libcgi-fast-perl

Yes, those packages worked for me with this type of configuration:

<Directory /var/www/public/a/dev/mutabletimes/>
    Options ExecCGI FollowSymLinks
    Allow from 192.168
    AddHandler CGI-Script .cgi
    <FilesMatch "^mt(?:-(?:comments|search|tb|view))?\.cgi$">
        SetHandler fcgid-script
    </FilesMatch>
</Directory>

I've found the following mod_fcgid configuration to work OK as well:

<IfModule mod_fcgid.c>
    AddHandler    fcgid-script .fcgi .php
    IPCConnectTimeout 20
    ProcessLifeTime 300
    MaxRequestsPerProcess 100
</IfModule>

After a few months of using Movable Type with FastCGI, I gave up and reverted back to regular CGI. I just got too many errors. I believe newer versions of Movable Type have better support for it. I hope so!

FastCGI with MTOS 4.25

I'm backporting these MTOS fcgi changes to 4.23 (which Debian has). Seems to work alright so far. I like this because I like to have higher limits for other fcgi processes, but quick restarts for MTOS - I'm going to try and find a good number.

Here are two new configuration options:

+            'FastCGIMaxTime'  => { default => 60 * 60 }, # 1 hour
+            'FastCGIMaxRequests' => { default => 1000 }, # 1000 requests

UPDATE: MovableType 4.3 has been released FastCGI is working great. Only issue I have is with plugins and updates, which require a server restart for new plugins or database updates to be recognized.

My Experience with and Review of Movable Type

At first, MTOS felt a little clunky. It was slower and had a lot of seemingly unnecessary complexity. After giving it a few months of use, I absolutely love it. Six Apart has done a great job. I plan to use Movable Type for a long time into the future!

Of course I have some recommendations:

Add a link to the edit template page from the template refresh confirmation page. I find myself refreshing templates, then returning to templates, then editing templates way too often; let's skip that middle step.
Use XSL instead of mtml, or at least offer the choice.
Give more flexibility with mt-static.
Uploaded asset templates.
Fix the Wordpress import mechanism. See Regexp Pattern for Importing Wordpress XML into MovableType

Hope someone is listening!

Movable Type 4.3+

Movable Type version 4.3 was a major speed increase from previous versions. FastCGI support improved substantially.

Movable Type Errors

MovableType Plugins

There are some really terrific plugins out there. Byrne Reese (Majordojo has written some of my favorites:

Movable Type Bob the Rebuilder
Movable Type Autolink
Movable Type Send to Process Queue

More good ones:

Extra Perl Modules

External

Informed Blogging