Meet The New Blog – Same As The Old Blog

[Update: ARG!!!  Lots of problems! Working on it…]

[Update: Okay, I think I fixed the problem by reloading the templates.]

[Update: Put back author names under the titles. Rebuilt static web pages.]

Windypundit has now been upgraded to run on Movable Type 4.

I started the process of porting Windypundit to the new software several weeks ago by building a test system. I rented space on another shared server and duplicated the whole Windypundit site on it.  I upgraded the blogging software on the test site from MT 3.34 (I think) to MT 4.  It was completely automated and went very smoothly.  Naturally, that wasn’t good enough.

The templates for Windypundit are based on the templates released with one of the early MT 3 implementations.  I’ve tweaked them to work with the newer versions of Movable Type, but it hasn’t always been smooth.  (Some of my regular visitors are familiar with all the problems with the comment pages.)  To fix that, I decided to re-implement all the templates based on the new template design that came with MT 4.

It took about two weeks.

By that time, the folks at Six Apart had announce the beta version of MT 4.01.  They were planning to fix a lot of little problems, so I decided to wait until they officially released the new version.

They did that last week.  So last night I backed up the live site and installed the upgrade.  Then I copied over all the PHP plugins I had written and all of the stylesheets.  Finally, I painstakingly cut and pasted all the templates from the test site to the live site (there were about 50 of them).  I just finished.

There are still a whole bunch of things I have to do, but the bulk of the site is working correctly.  The interface that us blog authors see is very different, but those of you who just read Windypundit shouldn’t notice many changes.

That bothered me.  I did all this work, and there was almost nothing different that anyone could see, except for a few minor format changes.  That’s how I wanted it to be, of course, but I still wished there was something on the site to show that everything had changed.  So I added a little dashboard menu bar across the top of the blog.  It doesn’t do anything that couldn’t be done before (in fact, all the old links are still in the sidebars) but the visual design echos the new look of MovableType.

I’ll be making more changes to Windypundit in the weeks and months to come.  I still need to move all the CSS files into the templating system so I can manage them through the Movable Type interface.  I also want to re-implement all the static pages (such as the About page) using MT 4’s new Page mechanism instead of as separate templates.

And I’m willing to bet that the comments system still isn’t working smoothly…