The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

Now that I'm starting up again with the regular blogging, I'm going to risk everything by trying to upgrade the software. We'll see how this goes... (The problem is that I do this so infrequently I forget everything I learned the last time.)

Edit: It would also help considerably if the documentation could make up its mind on what the upgrading instructions actually should be. The website says one thing, but the readme file says another.

Edit #2: OK, it's done, I think, three hours of frustration and bitterness later. Given that the license for Movable Type is free I guess I can't complain too much, but geez it's poorly documented. And what makes it extremely annoying is that one of the features Six Apart bragged about when pitching the upgrade was how well documented it was. I might not have cared so much if they hadn't gotten my hopes up...

I also think it might have a bug, because the wonderful comment-spam blocker I was using no longer seems to work. Which is distressing, because I'm not keen to have to delete spam again. So stand by, as I may have to turn comments off and on while I work this out (although at the moment they're still on).

I'm also so far not crazy about the upgrade because it affected the UI of the administration screens. I suppose I'll get used to them, and apparently they can be modified, but for now they just make me cranky...

Anyway, so far, except for the comment-spam thing, it all looks ok to me. Please let me know if you discover otherwise.

Edit #3: By the way, does anyone know how to make MT 4.01 automatically send out new posts as emails? I thought this version could, but I can't see how.

Edit #4: You know, I thought I had it figured out. I held off upgrading for a month to wait for all the bugs to be worked out. Unfortunately it seems like it would have been a much longer wait... Other parts of the system are also not working as intended. They won't really affect me, but it's really annoying since it means I'll probably have to do this again sometime soon. In any case, I do not recommend upgrading to anything higher than 3.3 for now (although the other, later 3.x versions are probably fine).

Edit #5 9/24: I know what I was thinking when I decided to upgrade. Six Apart promised all sorts of features I wanted to have for some other projects I'm working on. But it was so not worth it since it seems with the upgrade I've lost functionality I already had. It seems to all run slower, and the worst thing is that I'll have to turn off comments until I can get that anti-spam program working. Hopefully that will be soon, but I really have no idea, dammit.

Edit #6: In the further adventures of Cathy banging her head on the desk, I think user error may have contributed to the anti-spam plugin not working... On the other hand, if it weren't for the poor MT documentation that might not have happened. And I still think there is a significant bug in the comment part of the system, as its behavior is not what I'd expect it to be. For instance, I'm trying to turn comments back on, and yet that's not actually happened...

Edit #7: This was a good system: bitch and moan, then solve the problem... Seriously, it was actually constructive, as the venting helped relieve the pressure in my brain so that there would be space to reflect on screens that I'd previously seen such that I could derive clues to possible solutions from them. That's how I solved the plugin problem, by remembering something I'd seen on a screen that on further reflection I realized wasn't quite what I should have seen had things been working properly, and I used a similar mental mechanism to figure out how to finally turn the comments back on right now.

It now appears that everything is working (yes?), including the amazing spam filter and the comments themselves. I do, however, still have issues with the MT software. The documentation is too vague/inconsistent/obscured to be useful, it seems much slower than the previous version (3.3), and the general design of the administrative backend leaves something to be desired as well. I was able to figure out what was going on with the comments, and maybe the weirdness was due to the upgrade and will never be an issue again, but somehow I doubt it. There seems to be some poorly thought out behaviors stemming from these controls, where checking or unchecking certain boxes reverberates throughout the site in ways one wouldn't necessarily anticipate.

In any case, however, it looks like I can stop with the swearing for now and move onto writing more regular prose. Yay.