I’m one of the first kids on the block to be playing with Movable Type 4.2, I’d bet. My upgrade went smoothly until I tried to publish a new post, when I got a nice error about using a MTArchiveNext tag without a date context. Saywhat? My templates worked a moment ago.
Long story short (and written mostly for Google): MT 4.2 automatically added a handful of “archive mappings” to the Entry Listing template. Those archive mappings include ones (like category archives—which I’ve never used) that do not provide a date context, causing my date-based tags to fail.
Aaaaanyway, let me know if anything else broke. Maybe next time I’ll think twice before trying to upgrade something at midnight…
I’m glad that I don’t have to upgrade my girlfriend’s MT installation very often; it seems as though, version-to-version, more stuff breaks than when doing a WordPress upgrade.
Of course, new WordPress versions arrive every third day or so (okay, I’m exaggerating… a bit) so being on that treadmill is its own “reward.” Ah well.
The worst upgrade for me, by far, was moving to version 4—but that was because I recreated my site using the newfangled template system that was introduced then. (I forget now whether or not I had to revise my templates to get them to work…)
In general, though, the worst parts have been the mass of comment spam and the somewhat-pokey speed of the admin area. I hope the new version shows some improvement here.
I disabled MT’s comment system after dealing with problem upon problem thanks to spammers, either resource allocation or shoveling out the crap. The MT installations remaining on my server use “dotcomments” instead… it’s clunkier, indeed, and you can’t manage comments directly (shelling into the server to edit? yeah, fun) but spammers haven’t bothered to figure out how to abuse it, either. (Why pick on something nobody uses, right?)
On the WordPress side, of course, Bad Behaviour (which I also installed on my wiki) and Spam Karma 2 do a knockout job of preventing me from even seeing spam in the moderation queue more than a few times per month.
Feh. I didn’t mean to come off like I’m shilling for WP. I like it, but I don’t think everyone “has to” use it, either. I’m just saying, dealing with spammers is a neverending headache, so I feel your pain there.
Enh, no worries. I chose MT back in the day due to the other systems not being well-documented at the time, and I’m still with it because things have never become so painful that it was worth the time to switch.
Also, yesterday I discovered a “spam sensitivity” setting that I had never adjusted. That sucker has now been cranked up a notch, so we’ll see if it does any better. (So far so good… though I’m sad that it’s already been tested in the ten hours since I tweaked it.)