Movable Type Upgrade

I just upgraded to Movable Type 3.32 and am now running Movable Type on UTF-8 natively (that’s my doing, not Six Apart’s), but more on the Unicode issues later.

Here’s what I like about the changes in MT 3.3.

• Movable Type can now be configured (using the DeleteFilesAtRebuild configuration directive) to delete files made unnecessary by changes made in the administrative interface. Individual archive files are deleted when previously published entries are deleted or unpublished. Category archives are deleted when their corresponding categories are deleted.
• Pings coming from the same IP address with the same Source URL are now silently discarded. A success value is, however, sent to the pinging server so that the doesn’t keep trying to reping. [Not the best approach but better than duplicate pings.]
• The order of attributes specified in template tags is now observed and respected (e.g. trim_to=”10” remove_html=”1” is different than remove_html=”1” trim_to=”10”). In addition, the same attribute can now be processed multiple times if so desired (ie, regex=”abc” regex=”def”). [ Jacques must like that.]
• Added textarea resizing controls to the template editing pages.
• In version 3.2, using certain later versions of MySQL or postgreSQL, some non-ASCII characters were not returned correctly from the database as originally written. This was caused by a mismatch between the character_set_client and character_set_connection variables. To fix this problem, we’ve added a configuration directive, SQLSetNames, which will inform the database of the character set being used by the client. The database character set must match the PublishCharset used by Movable Type. [I had implemented it already in my system.]
• Implemented TrackBack transcoding between many character sets via Encode/JCode modules. This allows for correct display of TrackBacks sent in an encoding different than the recipient’s blog character encoding. [It is good that Six Apart is doing this, but I don’t like their implementation and prefer the one by Jacques Distler which I have been using already.]

I also like the inclusion of tags, though it would take me some time to populate my posts with tags and make any use of them.

The search page is barely working right now, but I’ll fix it soon. If there are any other problems with the upgrade (with commenting, trackbacks or anything else), please let me know.

I have also made some template changes. One is the inclusion of a menu bar at the top so that you can find the most common pages easily. Also, I am now including the sidebar in most pages other than individual entries.