I knew I should not have attempted this upgrade. I made the same mistake last year and it resulted in approximately 27 hours of high anxiety while I desperately scrabbled around every user forum trying to find an answer to “how the hell am I going to get my blog back?!”.
Well at least todays upgrade anxiety only lasted for 6 hours – I’m obviously getting better at this.
Before I started the installation I backed up my current MT folder and changed the details in mt-config.cgi-original and then renamed it to just mt-config.cgi. I found the old MT installation guide for version 3.2 was useful here.
Here are the problems I faced while upgrading movable type to version 3.31.
Problem 1: Error 500 on running mt.cgi
-turned out not all my .cgi files had the correct 755 permissions, so I changed these in smartFTP but I still got the error 500 message.
-next I realized that smartFTP was set to transfer everything as binary so I changed this to ASCII and uploaded everything again. Also confirmed permissions again.
-excellent – this solved the error 500 issue but gave me problem no 2.
Problem 2: On running mt,cgi and acknowledging that I was upgrading my installation, I get the error message – upgrade.tmpl cannot be found
-this was solved by uploading the extlib folder again. It seems as though not all the uploading went according to plan. My advice would be to keep repeating the upload until it works or at least check the error logs on your FTP client.
All running well now though, time will tell if the improvements are worth the stress. I’m hoping that there are some nifty ways to handle all the spam comments that I’m getting bogged down with at the moment.
UPDATE
Here’s a quick update on what I’ve found so far:
- The editing system no longer seems to support the Opera web browser. For example I can’t select categories from the drop down list. This is a big pain and has meant I have to use IE to finish the job – not ideal at all.
- The second new thing since my upgrade is the ability to use bulleted lists easily. I downloaded the FormatList plugin as it merges seamlessly with v3.31 so now I’m sure I will go list happy with the next few entries.
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