The upgrade to Movable Type 4.0 didn’t go as smoothly as some people have reported soon after the release of the final version, but it wasn’t all that bad either compared to past versions.
Upgrading, in itself, was an easy task.
I just followed the Recommended upgrade instructions, starting with a migration of the database from DB::Berkeley to MySQL.
I only ran into some minor issues:
The database migration script was taking too long when it came to handling a large amount of junk trackback pings I never had the patience to delete. I had to edit the script to skip that kind of class when migrating database objects.
The CGI scripts in the main installation folder of MT 4.0 returned a message about invalid headers. I had to edit the scripts with the proper includes for the perl installation on my server :
use strict;
use File::Basename;
use File::Spec;
use lib File::Spec->catdir(dirname($0), “lib”);
Once the scripts were running correctly, I was missing all CSS formatting on the admin interface of MT 4.0. It turned out that was because I used to have my ‘mt-static’ folder outside of the ‘cgi-bin’ folder. Moving the folder where it belongs solved that problem.
The last problem was trickier. Although I could see recent entries on the dashboard page and the Entries RSS feed, the ‘Manage -> Entries’ page returned no entries whatsoever. A message on the forum and an official support ticket later, I came across a solution by accident – setting the number of rows to display from 5 to another value brought the entries back.
Very strange.
I was not able to reproduce the problem, except by opening the admin interface for the first time, on a different browser and different machine. I don’t know if this is an issue with CSS, cookies or browsers. At least, there’s a workaround.
Now the only issue remaining is the update of templates and plugins, but that is not really related to the installation process. So far, it seems to be working pretty well except for the missing QuickPost wizard. It looks like the convenient wizard from MT 3.3 was replaced by a single link for Quickpost on the Entry form.
I wouldn’t be surprised if someone came with a plugin to restore that missing wizard.