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So here's the deal....I've been tweaking my templates for quite some time and trying to rebuild the 1500+ entries on dodoskido to reflect the changes for the longest time and have not been successful. I've finally figured it out...here are my tips for all of you entrenched in MT and not really looking to move over to Wordpress or any of that new fangled jingle jangle:

Movable type has an MTInclude feature...don't use it. Use php includes instead. Why? You can change something in your php include file and it will automagically update on all of your pages without rebuilds. Also, MT themselves say that MTInclude is slow if you use a bunch of them (I have at least 4 on every template...yikes).

Use .php extensions by default...If you're saddled with .html extensions like I am, there may be hope. Both involve fiddling with your .htaccess file. The first is doing a redirect:

RedirectMatch permanent /url/to/blog/archives/(.*)\.html$ http://your.weblog.url/blog/archives/$1.php

Simple right? You'll have to rebuild the site with the php extensions, but it may be worth it. The other way is to trick apache (not sure if this works for other webservers, but c'mon...what else is in widespread use out there?) into searching for php code to parse inside of .html (or whatever else) files with this code:

RemoveHandler .html .htm
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .htm .html

This will make apache look inside of .html and .htm files as well for php code.

On rebuilding MT with 1500+ entries...don't do it all at once. I know this sucks, but I was able to finally get it to rebuild and figure out how many I could handle at one time. I'm not sure if the multitude of MTIncludes has anything to do with it, but I suspect they may be partially responsible. So what happened when I tried to rebuild the entire site, MT would cause out of memory issues on the web server and the core woudl dump (crash). The core dump files sat in my MT root directory so I had to 1) figure out they were there and 2) delete them. Then I had to figure out how many I could rebuild at one time without getting a core dump. It so happens for me, that magic number is 30 entries (maybe up to 35, but even that caused core dumps once in a while). Mind you this does not happen for all of my blogs...just dodoskido. Another funny thing is that when I rebuild one entry it automatically rebuilds the one before it as well (presumably to make sure the "next" links to the right thing). In the end, I set my entries admin page for 30 rows per page and choose every other entry. Then just click rebuild and wait. I logged into my account via FTP to watch the file get rebuilt (just sort the archive directory by date descending). So after the 30 would finish building, I'd move to the next older set and do the whole thing over again. A day or so later, I had rebuilt all 1500+ entries I had...fun? No. Done? Yes, finally.

The next steps are to php-ify everything, move the MTInclude modules to php files and then do another rebuild pass to see if I've fixed the issues or made it more broken.

The leap to MT3.2 wasn't so hard (just had to remember to move the mt-static files to the right place). Let's see if this works now.

Douglas Bowman over at Stop Design has released a jaw dropping photo gallery powered by MT. It is utterly amazing. The templates require quite a bit of installation prowess and a mound of plugins, but luckily Douglas documented everything and the kitchen sink in extreme detail.

Anyway, he mentions an app called Photon that integrates with iPhoto on the MAC...I wish I had something like that on Windows. I'll have to see what I can find.

See For Yourself.

The new Movable Type release is looking to be pretty interesting. But. I'd have to redo ALL of my templates since they are ugly ugly hacked together pieces of utter crap. Sigh...

reBlog by Eyebeam R&D