Upgraded to Movable Type 4, and comments somewhat fixed
It’s not really visible, but I did a big change to the backend of this blog: I upgraded to Movable Type 4.
I’ve been wanting to rework this site for a while and upgrading was the first part of this process. It let me throw out a lot of old junk that this site has accumulated in its backend, such as some obscure plugins, and instead have only the core code. The only plugin I have is for creating smileys, and I had to rewrite this just a tiny bit, and now all is good again 
Movable Type still isn’t for the faint of heart… to get a test setup working on my local Mac OS X Leopard, I had to install MAMP, developer version of MySQL (to build the Perl MySQL plugin) + a bunch of other Perl modules (some of which, like ImageMagick, died with a strange error without compiling properly…)
There’s still a little bug with comments — if you’re not logged in, it shouldn’t show you the comment entry boxes… but I figured that it’s a quick way to keep the site working, pending a proper redesign + script rewrite. I’ve done some crazy things around structuring comments, and some of that isn’t really maintainable so I might choose to throw that out… or not, who knows.
MT4 is definitely an improvement when it comes to templates. If you have seen templates of earlier versions, they have basically been horrible duplicate spaghetti code with the same code being repeated all over the place in ten different templates and thus not really maintainable. MT4 takes the same approach that myself and presumably many other sites took a while ago, which is to split your template up into semantic reusable components, so that your master page templates are nothing more than lists of modules to include, and the main logic is in the (nested) modules. This makes it look like creating a new layout will be much easier with MT4 than with earlier versions.
Also, gone is the patchwork to deal with OpenID… MT4 takes a step towards proper user profiles and authenticating through multiple channels. I still can’t take anonymous comments because of spam, but now you can register yourself a user right here on this site and comment all you want. Or, if you have an OpenID, it’s much more clear now how to use that.
The admin backend UI has been reworked a lot… I’m not sure if I like it more than the old version. I was very used to the old one, but this new one doesn’t seem to be too bad either, once you figure out where things are. One of my biggest gripes is that I cannot see the “body” and “extended” texts at the same time as I’m writing a post. I use the “extended” text a lot, so this is not really nice 
but on the flip side, the text size in the post entering field is much more readable (larger).
Another good thing to say is that the upgrade was very smooth from MT 3.33 and the upgrade script just worked out of the box. No need to rewrite some of the data on my own like I had to do in the previous upgrades.
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